LibGuides: Philosophy: Books/Catalogs

The Library Catalog is UC LIBRARY SEARCH

Simple Search

Single white box
Huge results list
Many different types of resources; articles, books and more
Best when you are NOT looking for particular types of sources, e.g. - popular, scholarly, primary sources, empirical studies, DVD, etc.
Refine results with options on left margin

Advanced search

Use for complex searches
Many more options
Specify Articles books or more (big results list); Resources in the Library (small results list of mostly books); etc.
Specify type of resoruce
Specify one or more fields - author, title, subject, ISBN
Specify publication year, language, book
contains, starts with, exact phrase

Browse Search

NOT for keyword searching
Use for known item searches - e.g., titles, authors, subject headings

UC Library Search

Advanced Search • Browse Search

WorldCat Discovery @UCSB

WorldCat Discovery @UCSB is a way to find books and other materials located in libraries outside the UC System.

Other Catalogs

Center for Research Libraries Catalog
Consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries that acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other resources for research and teaching.
HathiTrust
Digital repository of scanned books, journals, and other library materials.
All users may access the bibliographic information for materials in the databases.
Full text is viewable for "Full View" materials. Those with UCSBnetID & password can download full text of "Full View" materials.
Library of Congress

Search Tips

When keyword searching, use keywords that best describe your topic. The objective is to get a small group of relevant records. People, places themes, characters, time periods, events, types of information (i.e. ethnography) issues and more can be keywords. What words or phrases best describe your topic?

Try: And, Or, Not

And -- "cell phone" AND distraction
Or -- ("cell phone" OR gps) and distraction
Not -- (Distraction and children) NOT adolescents

Use Quotation Marks, Asterisks, Parentheses, Question marks

Use quotation marks when searching a phrase.
- "information processing"

Use asterisks to find variations...
- Flavor* = flavor, flavorful, flavored, flavoring.
- *Psychology = parapsychology, pseudopsychology
- Behavi*r retrieves behaviour or behavior.

Use parentheses for searches like this:
- common cold AND (vitamin c OR zinc)

Use the question mark for different spelling as well as singular and plural versions of a word
- Wom?n = woman and women
- Gr?y = grey and gray
- Dog* = dog, dogs

Call Number Locations

An online version of the orange Library Locations handout, which tells you what floor, and part of the building (Ocean or Mountain side), the various library locations (Main, Andelson, Government Information, etc) and call numbers are on.

Call Numbers & Locations

Google Books

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is a library of over 70,000 free eBooks

Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for you to enjoy.