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About the Catalog
| Finding Information in the Catalog
About the UNC-Chapel Hill Catalog
| The UNC-Chapel Hill Online
Catalog is the most complete source of information about materials
owned by the UNC-Chapel Hill libraries.
The Online
Catalog is at http://www.lib.unc.edu/webcat/.
You can also get to the catalog from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries page at http://www.lib.unc.edu/index.html,
or through the HSL
home 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 list to the left of the search 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 'Keyword' and clicks Search. The catalog will do a keyword search
and bring back all books, journals, and other media that contain
the word 'alcoholism' 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 chooses Alcoholism and 'Subject Headings' from the
search type list, she will get a list of subject headings
relevant to alcoholism.
She can then click on a topic to see the titles (books, journals,
etc.) about that topic.
Notice the (LC) and (MeSH) options above the 'Subject Heading' search box.
These choices reflect the type of subject headings assigned for specific items owned by UNC. Library
of Congress (LC) subject headings are used for most academic libraries
on campuses. Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) reflect the medical
terminology. If a publication has a MeSH heading, it is probably
owned by the Health Sciences Library.
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Subheadings
The subheadings that appear after the subject heading can help
you narrow your search.
For example, in the subject search for alcoholism, Jane could look
at the items about alcoholism among American teenagers by clicking
the link after Alcoholism – Adolescents – United States.
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 exact title, minus words like "the"
and "a" if they are the first words of the title. 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 do a 'Journal Title' search and enter Nature
into the search term box.
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Multiple titles are retrieved by a journal title search for Nature. Jane starts with the first title.
There may still be multiple options. Many campus libraries will
identify all the volumes available.
If the full text of a journal is available online via UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries, a link within the catalog record ('
Full text via UNC-CH Libraries E-Journals List ') will lead Jane to the E-journals. Jane can then follow links to find the particular year, volume, issue and page number of the article she is interested in accessing. |
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