Type in keywords or terms. If you know the title of a book, type that in. If you know the author, that works too.
If you are looking for in-depth, comprehensive, scholarly information about a topic, a scholarly book might be your best option.
Books contain scholarly research on a topic and may address a whole subject rather than just a piece of it.
Information may already be two or three years old. Look for the most recent reference cited in the bibliography to give you an idea when the author(s) were researching and writing. Experimental/observational data that the author(s) gathered may be a year or two older than that.
Academic libraries in both print and digital formats.
Encyclopedias, handbooks, dictionaries and almanacs contain a summary of what is known about a topic. They contain facts and figures, dates, names, measurements, statistics, quotations, instructions, equations, formulae, definitions, explanations, charts, graphs, diagrams, and maps.
Print reference resources are often updated annually; however, online reference resources are usually updated continuously and contain links and multimedia. Reference resources usually tell you how old their information is.
Print reference resources can be found in the reference sections of most libraries. Online reference resources, such as Encyclopedia Britannica and Gale Virtual Reference Library, are located on the A-Z Databases web page on the library website.