Getting the most out of your library!

Learning Resources Service

Philip Abbott

Catalogue

The Resources at the Hub page is available both on and off campus. Look for the iSearch link on

Moodle or on the college website if you are accessing it from home.

Use it to find information for your assignments, to cast your net more widely for bibliographic

references (order these through our Inter-library Loan service), to read around a subject or provide

depth to information you already have; the Learning Resources Service iSearch page can get you

results!

Use the iSearch page to guide you to print resources on the shelf, connect you to e-books, find

millions of articles from a wealth of databases and e-journals and even more bibliographic

references on every topic under the sun.

The iSearch page.

Select the ‘Library Catalogue’ to search for books and ebooks. This will perform a simple search that

includes results for all formats.

Simply enter a phrase, a keyword or two keywords separated by the word ‘and’ and hit the Enter

key.

A list of results will appear.

Click on the title for copy information. You

may need to scroll down the page to find

this. You will also need the class number so

that you can find it on the shelf.

Use the Advanced/Guided Search

to look for items in a certain

format.

This is

used for

Boolean

searches,

wildcards

or exact

phrases.

Pick up our ‘Managing your account’

leaflet if you would like more

information on how to ‘Item request’

or ‘Reserve’ a book.

Reservations You can reserve a book that hasn’t any copies available. Item Requests These are useful if you are in college infrequently. You can search the catalogue from home, place an item request and we will retrieve the item from the shelf and put it by for you.

We have thousands of E-books.

In a list of results, it will say

what format the item is.

Click on the title and then the

resource link to load the e-book.

Navigating an e-book is easy!

iSearch

Use iSearch to search thousands of journals for articles on almost any subject under the sun! You can

also use iSearch to search the catalogue for books and e-books too!

Some journals are bought individually but most are part of large databases. These can be accessed

independently of iSearch from the Databases A – Z list.

Links are provided to the few resources that are not available through iSearch.

When in iSearch, you can create your own account where you can save your found resources. Click

on the Sign In link and then Create a new account on the right-hand side of the screen.

Don’t forget the Ask a Librarian function if you need to contact us.

When you find an article you like, open it and then you can save it to your ‘MySearch Folder’ by ....

Save found resources to your folder by selecting,

Alternatively, sent the full-text article and citation to your email address

Film Help

Searching iSearch (EBSCO Discovery by its trademark name) needs a little skill. The following link

(film) will help you to be able to search it better. This will not cover all the idiosyncrasies but

should help you and your students on your way.

http://support.ebsco.com/training/flash_videos/eds/eds.html.

When the ‘circling’ is happening, iSearch is still searching the databases

but when it has finished ‘circling’, a tick box appears.

To bring the results from these searches into the centre area, tick the

box of the database you require and select ‘Update’.

iSearch is preset to search for full-text items from the Library

collections.

However, iSearch has access to bibliographic metadata from

numerous databases and if you want to search this content,

just remove the tick from the ‘Full Text (Online)’ box.

You can acquire these items through the Inter-library loan

scheme. Ask at the Service Desk.

You can also search just the catalogue by removing the ticks

from the ‘Full Text (Online)’ box and adding a tick to the

‘Catalogue Only’ box.

You can further limit you results by selecting the ‘Publication

Date’ by simply sliding the date bar.

Most of our databases are ‘federated’ which means

the results of your search which appear in the

centre area. Some of the databases are ‘integrated’

and these results need to be added in. These

‘integrated resources are listed in the right-hand

column.

Don’t forget, at this point, you

can search by keyword, title or

Author.

To get fewer but more relevant results, select ‘Refine Search’ then ‘Advance Search’ to add other

search terms. You may also select the fields you want to search.

The Advance Search page also offers other ‘limiters’. The main limiters here are the Language and Peer Reviewed limiters. We would advise you not to use the Language limiter as we are not convinced it works.

The Location limiter is useful for limiting results on a catalogue search.

A – Z Journals The A-Z Journals area is useful when looking for specific titles or titles on a particular subject.

Select the Shibboleth login option to logon. There is an option to search within an individual title.

Databases A-Z

Click on Databases A-Z to see all the databases we subscribe to. These include the ebook databases

Dawsonera and ebrary.

Clickview

You can find the Clickview Player icon on your desktop.

Google

Looking for a specific article, try Google www.google.co.uk. Look for references that have a PDF

before them.

Search by keyword or subject to find

recorded television programmes.