Books provide good overviews and historical treatments of topics (textbooks are especially good for this).
They are lengthy enough to explore ideas in depth, and may provide bibliographies—especially scholarly books—which can be helpful for starting research or for finding more information.

Your broad, general keywords will help you find a book on your topic in the ACC Library Catalog. If, for instance, you were looking for information on chlordane, you might not find an entire book on it. But if you happened to know chlordane kills termites, and you used pesticide* or insecticide* in a Keyword search, you could find several books on pesticides that might have information on chlordane.

You could then use the table of contents in the front of the book or index in the back of the book to get to the specific pages on chlordane. You can search the contents of e-books (which you read on the computer) for specific terms and concepts. You might find e-books in your result lists when you search the catalog for books on your topic.