Searching the library catalogue, again

What you see and what we see on the library catalogue are pretty much the same. One difference is that we have administrator rights. One of the things administrator rights gives us is the ability to see what students are searching for in the library catalogue. It's not something we look at too often - life's too short after all, but we did look at the search log recently and were a bit surprised by what we found. Many students' searches are better suited to finding journal articles rather than books. This isn't going to work on the library catalogue. In previous years, DBS library staff would enter journal articles onto the library catalogue, in effect creating a mini-electronic resource. The electronic resources we subscribe to now are significantly better than what we had at the time when we entering articles into the catalogue. We can't compete with the multinational corporations who produce these resources and in any case we are better served answering your queries.

Anyway, here are some search tips:

Use the library catalogue to search for books. The best way to search for books, in my experience is to combine the author's surname with a meaningful word from the title, e,g, "mankiw and economics" or "scholes and strategy". If you don't know the author, enter a word from the title or the subject. Search for journals or articles elsewhere

Don't use the library catalogue as you would an electronic resource or even google (or any other search engine). Cataloguing books for the library is quite different to putting data into an electronic resource and generally speaking, we don't enter as much data -just enough to distinguish one book from another.

Keep your queries short. The longer the query, the more chance you will get no results, because there's more chance of making a mistake.

If English is not your first language, have a dictionary at hand. Also, don't use the author's name unless you know how to spell it (Decenzo, Ayckbourn)

Use the advanced search option to be more specific and at the same time, potentially limit the number of results retrieved. For example "depression" will return 102 results. Searching for "Depression" in the title returns 36 hits. Searching for "Depression" in the title and in media "dissertation" returns 6 hits.

There's an excellent guide to searching the library catalogue here