IARD 4020 Research Guide: Books & more via the Library Catalog

Looking for books on a topic? See this tutorial on searching the library catalog to see how to do a very general keyword search for your subject in the library catalog, find a relevant book, check under Availability to see how you can access it in print (look for the library, call number [book location] and availability) or online (look for the full text link), and find the subject headings.

Subject headings (aka subjects, subject terms, or descriptors) are ways that many databases and library catalogs categorize all items about a particular idea (not just items that mention an idea briefly). For example, you can search for the keyword sustainability (which could show up anywhere and only be briefly mentioned) or you can find a relevant item, look at the subject heading and click on the linked subject to find all the other materials that are all about that idea. You can also search again by subject headings. You'll probably find there's more than one subject heading that might apply to your topic and searching by these can make your search much more precise. For example, not only is sustainability a subject heading in the library catalog, but also sustainable development, natural resources management, etc.

Subject headings are like tags that collect all the books about a given subject, but they're standardized and assigned by librarians.

Check out the University of California Berkeley's tutorial on subject headings (it's for their library catalog, Melvyl, but the same techniques will work in our library catalog and in many of our databases).

Once you start locating books that look good, you can use the subject headings to narrow and refine your search for related material.