Law review and journal articles are a great place to begin your research, but be sure to look for books on your topic as well. Given the brevity of articles, they can only provide a limited amount of information. Scholarly books are great resources because they tend to be more thorough and detailed than articles.
Articles have the advantage of usually being available instantly via an electronic database, while books may need to be ordered and shipped from another library. Start your research early!
Begin with a keyword search in the Law Library Catalog to find books on your topic. Just as with searching for articles, you can use subject headings assigned to books to narrow your search and find additional books on your topic.
For example, a keyword search for "mass incarceration" will return multiple results, including the one in the image below. Click on the subject headings to find other books related to your topic but that didn't come up in your search because they don't include the phrase "mass incarceration" in the title.
When you see a book in the catalog that you are interested in, please note the LOCATION (e.g., 9th Floor) and the CALL NO (e.g., HV9471 .P449 2017) to find it in library.
The UIC Law Library tries to collect resources that students and faculty will need in their research, but we know that sometimes you will need resources from other libraries. To find materials outside of the UIC Law Library, you should first broaden your search to include the UIC University Library collections. You can do this from the catalog search bar by selecting either "UIC Catalog only" (limited to books and media) or "UIC Catalog & Articles" (includes article level results from many journals in the UIC University Library holdings). If you broaden the search further to "All I-Share Libraries", you will identify titles available from a network of Illinois libraries that can be requested and delivered to the Law Library for pick-up.
To ensure you've identified all titles on your topic, search in Worldcat.org, the catalog for libraries around the world. Once you find a title that you want, you will be able to see what libraries it is available at. If it is not available from UIC or I-Share, you can request it via interlibrary loan by contacting the UIC Law Library's Interlibrary Loan Coordinator, Catrina Williams, at catrinaw [at] uic.edu.
Please note that if the item is available at Chicago Public Library's Harold Washington Library across the street, we would ask you to retrieve it there in order to save time and expense.
If you are working on a journal source and cite assignment, consult the Resources for UIC Law Journals guide for details about the interlibrary loan process. If you are working on a paper for a course or writing an article yourself, see the library website for details about the interlibrary loan process.