SEARCHING LIBRARY CATALOGUE

15 MINUTE TUTORIAL TO FIND WHAT YOU NEED

LRC Skills

Library Catalogue Online

The online library catalogue is a website with information

about everything you can find in the Library and where to

find it. It looks a bit like Google, but it works slightly

different, it has its own specific rules and functions.

To access LRC Catalogue Online (called Heritage) go to

Student Portal and click on link to LRC Portal:

To search catalogue put your search term in

the search box on the right side of page

(Simple Search) or click on Advanced Search.

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Choosing Keywords

You will save a lot of time and get better results if you spend a while thinking about what you want to find.

If you are interested in how nutrition affects sport performance, take a piece of paper and pen, and write a list of words and phrases relevant to your topic – keywords. For example: nutrition, nutrients, proteins, exercise, energy… Think about similar words, e.g. food and nutrition. These are your search terms. Now you are ready to search.

Search for simple, short phrases. Break down what you want to search for into small pieces: you should search for nutrition AND sport, not How nutrition affects sport performance.

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Simple Search

Simple Search is good for exploring resources on a particular topic.

For example, type nutrition and click on the search button (a magnifying glass).

Make sure you spell words properly, because unlike Google, catalogue search won’t correct them for you.

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Search Results

A Simple Search found all the resources where nutrition is mentioned in the title or description: books, DVDs etc.

36 resources have been found with newest on the top; use the arrows to jump from one page of the results to another.

If any of those resources seem to be useful, click on the title to see more details and find out where it is in the LRC.

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Catalogue Record

Catalogue record – gives you information about a resource and its location in the LRC.

There are two copies of this book in the Library. One is on loan till 24 Nov 2010 and one is available – it should be on the shelf.

Shelfmark describes this resource’s location on the LRC shelves.

Remember to write down Shelfmark if you want to find what you need quickly.

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* wild card

If you are looking for resources on disability, you will be interested in all keywords: disabled, disability, disabling, so using disab* as your search term will give you more results.

Try with child and child*

Asterisk says “please substitute me with other characters”

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If you are not sure about spelling you can use asterisk, for example: behavi*r

Advanced Search

In advanced options you can choose field you will search in (like author or title ), you can define media type (books, DVDs ) and you can add more lines and build precise search using: AND, OR, AND NOT (to use those you not necessary need to go to advanced search, you can just type them in capitals between your search terms, e.g.: children AND advertising)

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Field If you know the title or author

of the book or, lets say you want to search books by Shakespeare and not about him – try using “Search in” in Advanced Search.

Useful search fields: Author Class Series title Title Publisher Publication Year

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If you know classification number for your subject, you can use it as search term: just choose “Search in: Class” and type number. Adding star will give you better results, try: 150* for psychology

Media Type

Maybe you just need DVDs or you are only interested in books or magazines – then you should use “Media type” in Advanced searchMedia types you can find in

college LRC: Book CD (electronic materials accompanying

books) Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) Journals (Magazines – you can only search

for magazine title, it is not possible to search for articles)

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AND

AND (in capitals) in between nutrition AND sport tells the catalogue that both search terms must be in the same resource, otherwise we are not interested. – We are not interested in nutrition AND children, not interested in nutrition AND health, not interested simply in nutrition.

We are looking for how nutrition affects sport performance, therefore we should search for nutrition AND sport.

We got 5 results – that’s a good start.

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OR

OR means “either one or another”. For example, the search woman OR female will bring all the resources with woman in the title or description, as well as female in the title or description.

Let’s say you are wondering if library holds any resources on traveling, tourism etc. – you could search for travel OR tourism to find them all.

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We got 164 results with word travel or word tourism in title or description.

Difference between OR and AND

Try searching for: care AND learning

and then: care OR learning

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There is a big difference in number of search results and subjects of the books.

Which one? OR or AND?

AND narrows search use AND to combine keywords and find more specific

resources that are about both things, like: advertising AND children

be careful it is easy to make your search too specific and in effect not be able to find anything

OR expands search displays resources that are about one thing or another use OR to search for alternative keywords, like: sport OR

fitness

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AND NOT

AND NOT narrows search searches for the first

one but not the second one

use if you want to exclude something from your search results, like: mice AND NOT computer

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Library classification system All the books in Libraries are arranged using some kind of

system. Most of the Libraries in UK is using Dewey Decimal Classification system in which all knowledge is divided into 10 groups:000–099 general works

100–199 philosophy and psychology200–299 religion300–399 social sciences400–499 language500–599 natural sciences and mathematics600–699 technology700–799 the arts800–899 literature and rhetoric900–999 history, biography, and geography

These 10 main groups are in turn subdivided again and again to provide more specific subject groups.

Hi, I’m Melvil Dewey.

Classification - my idea!

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600Technology and applied

sciences

610Medicine

and health

616Diseases

616.3Diseases of digestive system

616.39Nutritional

or metabolic diseases

616.398Obesity

616.2Diseases of respiratory

system

616.23Diseases of trachea and

bronchi

616.238Asthma

616.24Diseases of lungs

616.241Pneumonia

Dewey Classification

Dewey Classification means that books on the same topic have the same number. And although it looks quite complicated and not always works perfectly (especially with resources that treat about more than one subject) Dewey classification has a lot of logic!

Have a look at the graph and analyze how the number changes with subject getting more specific.

Ask librarian for number range for your subject and you will exactly know where to look in other libraries.

How to find book in LRC

In College LRC every book has a shelfmark that consist of Dewey classification number and usually 3 first letters of author’s surname (except Fiction and Careers that are shelved before all other books)

You will find shelfmark in the Catalogue and on the spine of the book.

On the shelves books are organised by number:

And within the same number – by alphabetical order: Do you remember where to find shelfmark?

779SOE

780ALD

780.002

JAM

780.01SMI

780.028

GRY

780.1BAL

780.19MAR

781.1ADA

781.1AST

781.1CON

781.1SER

781.1SET

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Well done!

Now you know how to search and find resources in almost every

library, catalogue or database.

For more information go to the LRC Portal or ask Librarians. We are here to help

Thank you!