General Suggestions
You can try starting off by doing a search for your specific region in our catalog, but you may get few results back.
If so, I would recommend searching by the name of your state and then looking to see if any of the retrieved items might be relevant, or have a relevant section, on your topic. Keep in mind that books on the geology of the broader region around your state (such as the "Mid-Atlantic") may have a chapter or section on your topic. You might even want to start by doing a very broad search for Geology--United States. Click here for more tips on choosing search terms.
Tips: Try searching for the name of your state as a keyword with "Geology Guidebooks" in the subject field.
If someone else has checked out a book that you want, check to see if you can request it from another library.
Useful Series/Titles
Roadside Geology series & Geology Underfoot series (Mountain Press Publishing Company): Intended to provide useful information to the interested layman, these books provide a good overview of a state's geology. These guides have been created for many, but not all, states in the USA. To check to see if a guide to your state has been published, search our catalog.
The Centennial Field Guide, published by the Geological Society of America, is a six volume series that covers the geology of the United States by region. This is located in the Oversized section of the library.
The Geological Society of America also publishes a number of other series that might have useful content for your papers. Do a keyword search in our catalog for Geological Society of America and the name of your state/region to look for this content.
Not Finding Anything in Our Catalog?
If you are not finding relevant materials in our collection, here are two places you can try looking:
WorldCat: This is one of the databases that we subscribe to and it includes records from over 71,000 libraries around the world. If you find something useful here that we do not have, then try to borrow it from another library.
Google Books: This is the result of a project in which Google scanned materials from major research libraries around the country, and also colloborated with publishers to provide access to their content. For much of the content you will only be able to see a small preview of the text, but you can search across the full text to see if there is a chapter or a section that focuses on your topic. This is pretty hit or miss but can be worth checking.
