The students of Wyoming Seminary know the school as one that requires them to do many research papers. Usually students are given these assignments by their history and English classes, and many dread working on them.

However painful these papers may be to complete, the library staff helps ease the pain a little bit by providing students with easy to use databases for finding sources for their papers. The Library subscribes to these databases for a fee. Librarian Ivy Ballard Miller says that the library staff “researches these databases and picks and chooses the ones that we view will be most helpful and effective for the students.” The library offers a list with all of the databases it subscribes to as well as the usernames and passwords that are required to use the sites. Some of these databases include “Annals of American History,” “Gale Science Resource Center,” “Historical Newspapers,” as well as many others.

Cicely Hazell ’11, finds the databases to be very helpful overall. “I find some databases are hard to use, but the History Study Center is really helpful when I’m writing a historical research paper.” Hazell says that it is the first resource she turns to when she is starting a paper. “I can usually find things on the database easier than I can find them on Google. I am glad these resources are available because without them I don’t know what I would do.”

Patrick McMullan ’11 shares the same sentiments as Hazell. “I found the databases especially helpful when I was writing many of my papers for Mr. Lewis’s various classes. He always demanded very detailed papers, and it was very easy to find information on the various sources available through Wyoming Seminary.” McMullan hopes that these resources will be available to him in the future when he attends college because “once you use these databases it is hard to go back to just searching through random books. I like how you can find everything in one place, which allows my research to go much more smoothly.”

As evidenced many Sem students find these databases to be very helpful and use them frequently.