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Milner Library

HIS 300 - Senior Seminar in History

Accessing Books with Milner's Catalog

Introduction

You can still start your search using the Milner Catalog, found on Milner's homepage. Keywords can be entered either in the basic search box or by clicking the Advanced Search link (recommended).

 

Advanced Search Suggestions: .

1. The first section shows which part of the library you are searching. The Library (Milner) Catalog button lets you looks for books and other material available at Milner, including ebooks. 

2. Just below is the actual search box. It works the same way as every other search box.

  • Enter keywords into the search boxes. Separate subtopics between boxes, connecting them with AND.
  • Any Field dropdown box identifies where in the records the catalog will search when retrieving results. It is formatted as a keyword search by default, but you can change this to title, author, etc. If you are working from a bibliography, select the Title or Author option.
  • Contains identifies how the catalog will treat the keywords within the box. The default asks the catalog to find keywords in no particular order. Use quotation marks in this case if you want an exact phrase. Alternative options may be too specific to get accurate search results unless you include a specific known phrase.

3. The Add a New Line option creates a new set of boxes if you have a more specific search that requires more boxes.

4. This last section will let you specify the type of material you want. If you only want to see a certain type of material (books, movies, journals, dissertations, etc.), you can specify that here. You can also limit to a specific language or publication date in this section.

***Note: To locate primary sources, terms such as Sources, Correspondence, Diaries, Personal narratives, Oral history, or Interviews are commonly used terms for these types of resources. You can include these terms to your search to improve the likelihood of finding primary sources in the catalog.   

 

Search Results

1. Each item will list the citation information: the title, material type, author, and publication date. 

2. Just below the citation information will list whether the book is available and in what format.

  • E-books will show "Available Onlilne."
  • Print books will say "Available" and list the call number.

3. There is a list of filters on the left side of the page. Some specific filters you may want to pay attention to:

  • Availability - This will let you limit to just e-books or just print books 
  • Subject - This will let you see the library-created subject terms that describe each item's contents
  • Location - This will limit to just the items on a particular floor

 

Clicking the title will take you to the full record.

  1. Scroll down to see how to access the item. This will look slightly different for print and electronic materials. For e-books, clicking the button under Full text availability (Ebook Central) will open a PDF of the item.
  2. Scrolling lower will show the citation information and subjects for the item.
  3. Below the citation information is the synopsis for the book

If the item is available in print the bottom of the page will show a list of books with similar call numbers (virtual browse)

Additional Links