What Books Are in the Library?
Use the library catalog to determine what the library owns in the way of hard-copy circulating and reference books. Each record in the catalog gives a call number and location for physical items located in the building.
To access the the library catalog from the library's website, click on the "Find..." link in the left-hand column. The first link on the page you land on is for the library catalog.
If you're looking for e-books, it's best to use URsearch instead. (The library catalog includes records for some but not all of the e-books we own.) You'll find the URsearch search box at the top of the library's homepage. Begin your search using this simple search box, but once you've got a results list, use the left-hand menu to limit the results to only e-books. To do this, go to the Source Types section of the left-hand menu and select the e-books option. If that option is not showing, click on the Show More link at the bottom of the section.
What About Other Libraries?
If you don't find the book(s) you need in the library catalog (or if the book is currently unavailable), you can broaden your search to include OhioLINK and SearchOhio.
Once you've conducted a search in the library's catalog, you'll see the following set of buttons at the top of the page:
Clicking on these buttons takes you into the OhioLINK or SearchOhio catalog, where you can place requests for materials to be sent to you at either Ursuline College or at a nearby participating institution.
OhioLINK is a statewide consortium of academic libraries. This means that OhioLINK is usually a better option than SearchOhio when it comes to looking for college research materials.
SearchOhio is a statewide consortium of public libraries. This means that SearchOhio is more likely to have materials suitable for the general public. Incidentally, SearchOhio is an excellent resource for finding fiction and films.
FINDING BOOKS IN THE LIBRARY CATALOG
SEARCHING IN THE CATALOG
In the library catalog you can search for books in multiple ways, including using a keyword, an author, a subject, and/or a title. All of these will produce different results in the catalog.
KEYWORD SEARCHING
A keyword search produces results for any item in the catalog whose record includes the word or phrase you are searching. So, for example, if your search term is medieval history, you may get results with that phrase in the title, table of contents, summary, etc. Keyword searches are therefore the broadest way to search, oftentimes resulting in many--sometimes too many--results.
SUBJECT HEADINGS
College library catalogs usually use Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH) as a means for classifying content. In comparison with keywords, subject headings (which you'll see in each catalog record as clickable links) constitute a highly regimented and consistent system of organization.
If you know an exact subject heading for a given topic, you can conduct a subject search in the library catalog. Here are some examples of Library of Congress subject headings you can use when conducting this kind of catalog search:
If you find a book to use that's in the library's circulating collection (2nd floor), you might also want to browse those books on the shelf next to it since they might be on the same general topic.