Find Research Materials in Your Language

Summer language programs at Middlebury are fun and fast-paced. Whether you’re studying in person or online, every hour of every day will be packed with learning. As you work toward fluency in your new language, you’ll notice that time begins to feel more and more precious. So, we want you know that library guides are an efficient way to find high-quality research materials.

Searching for Research Materials in Your Language

Some of your classes will ask you to use articles in newspapers or scholarly journals. You also might need to look for books and movies. If you start at a search engine like Google, you’ll retrieve page after page of potentially useful results.

That’s great, right? Not really, since most search engines don’t provide an easy way to filter your results. It could take you a long time to identify the best items. 

What do we mean by “the best items”? Well, for one thing, we’re referring to articles, books and films created by people who are experts in their fields. In addition, most students prefer to use sources that they can access without paying a fee. 

Start at Library Research Guides

This is the reason why we recommend starting at library guides when you need research materials. Library research guides are curated by librarians. They point to high-quality language resources that are available either through a Middlebury Library subscription, or for free. Since you’re a Middlebury student, you don’t have to pay extra for any of the sources we link to in our guides.

Here’s how to find library research guides:

1. Go to the Language Schools Library Orientation Guide. There, you’ll be introduced to our most common language resources.
2. To find additional sources, follow the link to the guide for your language.
3. The guide for your language will include not only links to additional language-specific resources, but also the name of the librarian who specializes in resources for that language. Contact the librarian for a personalized introduction to library resources!

Visit the Language Schools Library Orientation Guide (go/lslibguide/). We’ll look forward to hearing from you!