The online catalog is a useful tool for finding a wide variety of library resources, including books, videos, electronic documents, and manuscripts. While searching the catalog for information on your topic, you may discover items that you did not intend to find, but that reveal the larger body of works related to your subject. For example, if you were looking in the catalog for a book on your topic, you may uncover some manuscript holdings that would enhance your research with some primary documents. Conversely, if you were looking in the catalog for manuscripts, you may turn up books, videos, or electronic documents that provide important context for the manuscript materials. In this way, you may use the catalog as a means to discover the breadth of the library's resources as they relate to your topic.
For example, a keyword search in the catalog for the terms "women," "plantation," and "North Carolina" yielded results, including a book, an electronic resource, and manuscript collections related to the topic of women on North Carolina plantations.
Begin your online catalog search by entering your keywords. (Note: the catalog defaults to a "keyword search" so you need only to enter your keywords in the search box and select "Search.")
Tips:
- Connect your keywords with the word "and" in order to find instances of all those keywords in the same record. [Example]
- Connect your keywords with the word "or" in order to find instances of one or the other of those keywords in the records. [Example]
- Keywords not connected by "and" or "or" will be searched for as a phrase with the keywords adjacent to each other and in the order specified.
- Use a "?" near the end of a keyword to search for variations on the ending of the word. [Example]
- If you wanted to limit your catalog search to materials in either the Southern Historical Collection or the University Archives, use "and Southern Historical Collection" or "and University Archives" as one of your keyword phrases.