CRAIG GABLE
Personal Librarian
for Students in
History
Call Me
440-449-4080
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E-mail Me
craig.gable@ursuline.edu
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Visit Me (first floor, BL8)
make an appointment
Why Use a Reference Book?
Reference books are designed to provide you with an introduction to a given topic. In other words, they serve as a starting point for students who don't already possess a foundational knowledge of that topic. Though reference books don't necessarily get get cited in research papers, they certainly can play an important role in helping you early on in your research process.
If you're having problems with off-campus access to online library resources (chiefly research databases, e-books, and streaming video), the most common reason is that the resource doesn't recognize you as an authorized user. An easy way to fix this problem is to go to the MyUrsuline webpage and log in. Then continue to use that same browser when accessing the library 's resources.
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Call: 440-449-4202 |
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Text: 440-306-7068 |
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Make an Appointment |
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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 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 instance, if your search term is medieval history, you may get results with that phrase in the title, series, table of contents, summary, etc. So keyword searches are the broadest way to search, oftentimes resulting in lots of results (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're likely be on the same general topic.
SELECTED CIRCULATING LIBRARY BOOKS (2nd floor)
SELECTED LIBRARY E-BOOKS
