Find a Book on the Catalogue

You can search for a book in the catalogue by keying in any combination of author, title or keywords as you wish.

Here are some examples:

• James Joyce
• Rural ethiopia
• Curtin Kelly
• Stevens Harmonium
• After the celtic tiger

Use * wildcard to expand your results e.g. econom* Ireland

For exact phrase search, enclose in "" e.g. "south africa", "Tony fahey"

If presented with a range of choices in your results, use the various tools in the catalogue to narrow down the results.

The item summaries provide information about availability and shelfmarks to locate items on the shelves - for more details click on the title of the item of interest.

For digital books (e-books), you will be provided with a link to follow to view the book online.

The icons to the left of each listed item show you easily its format.

Printed Books

For printed books the catalogue tells you:

• If the library has the book you are looking for
• Where the book is located (e.g. Health Sciences Library)
• The loan type is: e.g. Short Loan, 4-Hour Loan, Long Loan or Week Loan
• If the book is available to borrow
• How to request a book that is already on loan
• The shelfmark of the book (e.g, 346.03 is the shelfmark for books on Tort Law).

This shelfmark will help you find the book. It consists of numbers and letters and corresponds to the number on the spine of the book on the shelf.

For example, J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone is located at 823/ROW.

• 823 - Shelfmark for English Literature
• ROW - First 3 letters of author’s surname

To borrow this book, go to the shelf where the book is located, and bring the book to the Service Point or Express Service machine. You can then take the book out of the Library.

Please ask a staff member if you need help finding a book.

The catalogue record for the book you are reading is also useful for referencing the book in your assignment. For this, you will need:

• Author/editor of the book
• Full title of the book
• Year the book was published
• Place the book was published
• Name of the publisher of the book
• Edition of the book, if relevant.

For digital books (also known as e-books), you will be provided with a link to follow to view the book online instead of a shelfmark.

E-Books

If the book you find in the catalogue has an electronic version there will be a link in the catalogue record that you can click to access the book online.

As well as individual e-book titles that you find in the catalogue, you can also explore and browse through a number of e-book collections on a particular subject or theme. You can find these in our online discovery tool findit @UCD Library.

• Login with your UCD Connect login and password when prompted.
• Then pick e-books from the menu and you can browse a large number of individual reference titles and subject collections of online books.