Tutorial: Searching for Books

This tutorial will show you how to find books through Feinberg Library’s main search tool, Find It at Feinberg! You should open a second browser window and work through the steps as you read.

Start at the Feinberg Library home page: https://www.plattsburgh.edu/academics/library

You’ve already seen the library home page in last week’s tutorial file. Today we’re going to use at the search box, located in the middle of the home page:

Search box

The easiest way to search the library for books is to:

  1. click the radio button marked “Books”
  2. type your search terms in the box
  3. click “Search” (or hit the Return key)

The library’s home page search is set up so that, by default, it will only search materials that you can immediately access — either articles or e-books that you can download on your computer, or books that we have physical copies of in the library building.

You can also search WorldCat from the library home page — see the link below the search box, next to Research Tools. WorldCat searches the catalogs of libraries worldwide and provides links to request items through interlibrary loan. As you’re beginning your academic career you won’t need to use it, but later, when you’re doing advanced research projects, it can be invaluable.


OK, so let’s do a search from the library home page. Remember to click the radio button marked “Books.”

As an example I’m going to search for Paulo Freire, who was a Brazilian educator of the 20th century. Since “Paulo Freire” is a person’s name, or, more generally, a proper noun, our best bet is to just start searching with that name.

Books in the stacks

Search results

Here’s the results page. On the right hand side of the page are a number of dropdown options that you can use to limit the number of results. Explore these.

I’m pointing out the third result, for the book Teachers as Cultural Workers, because I can get that in the library stacks. I can tell that from the last line, “Available at Feinberg Library General Coll. (LB880. F73 PT6413 1998)”. The code in parentheses is a Library of Congress call number; it tells me where in the stacks the book is.

Now, click on the title of the book…

Single item view

Here’s the book’s item page. I’ve highlighted two key sections of the page. The first is two tools, to create a permanent link to this page, and to retrieve a citation in one of several different styles. The second is a list of subject headings for the books. These are each links that will search for other books on the same topic.

Ebooks

OK, that covers physical books. But many of our books aren’t available in the stacks. They’re available as digital items, to download or to read through the library website.

From our search results above, here’s what an ebook looks like:

An ebook in search results

Note that instead of a call number, the text below the book information reads “Available Online.” Click that link, or on the title of the book.

Now you’re on the book information page again. To read the book, look for the section titled “View Online”:

Ebooks: view online

Click the highlighted link and you’ll be taken to the publisher’s page, where you can read or download the book.

For more detailed information on how to use our library search system, start with the video Performing Basic Searches in Primo VE.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.