Research skills: Literature search: How to find books

Handy hints before you begin

• Search the Library Catalogue for a Title



• Search the Library Catalogue for books by an Author

The tutorials are in video format: you'll need to have Adobe's Flash player installed on your computer.

Finding books on a specific Linguistics topic

To do more complicated searches for books in the Library on a particular aspect of linguistics, you should use the Guided Keyword Search option on the Library Catalogue. This will let you use search combinations of terms to define exactly what are you looking for.

Some words of advice: don't use Keyword (Search engine style) - it's quite unreliable as a means of finding out what books the Library has on a particular topic.

Can't find your book?

If you are looking for books on a set topic as part of your course work, you should bear in mind that there will be other Linguistics students looking for books on that same topic; you may find that when you go to find books on the Library shelves that another student has beaten you to it. A good strategy is to have a look in the relevant Reshelving area; there you should find trolleys with books that are waiting to go back to their correct places in the Main collection sequence after having been returned from loan, or after people have read them in the Library.

If the book you want is on loan, you can Request it - just click on the Requests tab on the Catalogue page. The person who has the book will be asked to return it within one week; we'll email you to tell you can collect it as soon as it has been returned.

Let's find some books!!

Remember: click anywhere on the images on the following pages, or on the arrow button, to go to the next page.

Click when you are ready to begin a demonstration of how to use the Library Catalogue to find books on Linguistics topics.