Tutorial: Searching for Books

This tutorial will show you how to find books in the Feinberg Library catalog. You should open a second browser window and work through the steps as you read.

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

This is where it gets confusing. Right now there are three different interfaces through which you can search the Feinberg catalog.

In this tutorial I’ll concentrate on IDS. IDS is the most versatile interface and the one I tend to use more often. It will search for books, DVDs, and other materials in libraries beyond Plattsburgh if it doesn’t find anything in Feinberg’s holdings. It makes it very easy to get such items through Interlibrary Loan and to see previews of books via Google Books.

The second interface is PlattCat. This interface lets you do more detailed searches by the physical form of material, by publication date, and a number of other areas. But it only searches Feinberg, not other libraries. For the purposes of this week’s assignment you should be OK using only IDS.

So, back at the Feinberg home page, click on the “Find Books” tab. In the screenshot above I’ve highlighted the search box for IDS.

From the Feinberg home page you can also search:

• PlattCat
• WorldCat (the third interface for our catalog, not covered in this tutorial; it searches the same database as IDS with more powerful search options but is much less user-friendly)

Back to the IDS search. Type in some search terms. Remember to look at the “Seven Critical Steps to Getting Better Search Results” handout for hints.

As an example I’m going to search for Orville Wright of the Wright Brothers. Don’t worry at this point about keyword vs. title, etc. Just search keyword, which will return the widest set of results.

Here’s the results page. The first hit, To Conquer the Air, looks pretty good. Try clicking both the title of the book and the call number (the line that reads "General Coll.. TL540.W7 [etc.]). You’ll find that the title link goes to the item in the IDS catalog, while the call number link leads to the item in the PlattCat catalog. [Confused yet? :-) ]

Also on this page note the “Cite This” and “Permalink” links. If you click on “Cite This” you can copy and paste mostly-correct citations in various styles. And “Permalink” will give you a shorter URL that will always work. When you’re copying links for use in an assignment use the permalink URL.

Now, click on the title of the book…

Here’s the book’s item page in the IDS catalog. You’ll note the long summary of the book and the list of topics the book covers (which are themselves links that will search for other books on the same topic).

And if you scroll down, in many cases you’ll find a preview of the book as it appears in Google Books. Sometimes what’s in that preview will be all you need. Other times you might need to find the book by using the call number.

Next, go back to the results page. Click on the button, on the left-hand side of the page, that reads “Quick delivery libraries”. You should see the following page:

This is the page of results from “quick delivery libraries”. These are items held at other New York libraries, mainly other SUNY schools and the New York Public Library. The big difference is the “Get it Now” button for each item. If you click on that button, you’ll be taken to Feinberg’s Interlibrary Loan (ILL) system. You will log in with your usual Plattsburgh userid and password. If you’ve never used ILL before the next screen will ask for your contact information. After that you’ll see a screen that has all the information on the book already filled in. You can check it over and then hit the submit button at the bottom of the screen. The book will arrive at the circulation desk in 3-4 days; you’ll be sent an email when it comes.

Also note that you can further refine your results by, say, selecting only DVDs or only items in English.

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