Using the Online Catalog

About the Catalog | Finding Information in the Catalog | Subject Heading Searches | Refine Your Search | Title Searches

About the UNC-Chapel Hill Catalog

The UNC-Chapel Hill Online is the most complete source of information about materials owned by the UNC-Chapel Hill libraries.

The Online Catalog is at http://search.lib.unc.edu.

You can also get to the catalog from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries page at http://www.lib.unc.edu, or through the HSL page at http://www.hsl.unc.edu/.

Finding Information in the Library Catalog

To search the catalog, enter your topic in the search box. Then choose the search type from the drop-down box, and click Search.

Let's use the case study of Jane to illustrate how to use the catalog effectively. First, Jane enters her topic (alcoholism) in the search box, chooses 'Anywhere' and clicks Search. The catalog will do a keyword search and bring back all books, journals, and other media that contain the word 'alcoholism' anywhere in the catalog record.

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Subject Heading Searches

Keyword searches often return a very large number of items. You may need to wade through many irrelevant items to find what you are looking for. Subject heading searches are more efficient.

If Jane searches for 'Alcoholism' and chooses 'in Subject Heading' from the drop down list, she will get a list of items with alcoholism listed in the catalog as a subject.

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Refine Your Search

The choices that appear after the to the left of the search results can help you narrow your search.

Notice in particular the Subject and Medical Subject headings. These choices reflect the type of subject headings assigned for specific items owned by UNC. Library of Congress Subject Headings (Subject) are used for most academic libraries on campuses. Medical Subject Heading (Medical Subject, also called MeSH) reflect the medical terminology. If a publication has a Medical Subject heading, it is probably owned by the Health Sciences Library.

For example, in the subject search for alcoholism, Jane could look at the items about alcoholism among American teenagers by Adolescent under Medical Subject and United States under Region. The books are still in the alcoholism subject area, but are about a very specific topic within alcoholism research.

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Title Searches

To find a particular journal, put the journal title into the Search Term box. You must enter the full title, not the abbreviated form used in some citation styles. Remember to use the name of the journal and not the title of the article!

For instance, Jane found a reference to an article in the journal Nature that she thinks might be interesting. To limit her search to the journal title, she should enter Nature into the search term box and choose 'in Journal Title' from the drop-down box.

Multiple titles are retrieved by a journal title search for Nature. Jane starts with the one called Nature [serial].

There may still be multiple options. Many campus libraries will identify all of the volumes available.

If the full text of a journal is available online, a link within the catalog record ('Full text via the UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries') will lead Jane to the e-journals. Jane can then follow links to find the particular volume, issue, and page number of the article she is interested in accessing.