The
online catalog contains information about
over 900,000 books (print and
electronic),
audiovisual materials and computer software
in the Los Angeles Community College
District
libraries, giving access to approximately
1600 items at the South Gate Education
Center Library. You can search the
online catalog from the library, as well
as from any Internet connection. You will
not find information about periodicals,
magazines or newspapers in the Online
Catalog.
From the Online Catalog page, you can
perform various types of searches to find
the items in the Catalog. The most
common searches are: Subject, Author,
Title and Keyword. Below you will find
screen shots of pages at different stages
of the search process and step-by-step
directions on how to search using each
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This
is the main online catalog page. This
is your starting point. From
here you will go to the search page of
your choice. As you can see,
each choice is clearly labeled. You
can always hit the "Back" button to return
to the main online catalog page.
The Online Catalog allows you to narrow
your search by choosing the format of
your item. Are you looking
for a book or a magazine? Then
you can go further by specifying what
language you want your item in. So
if you are looking for a book in Spanish,
this is where you would decide this. The
two screen shots below illustrate how
to search.
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Step
1: Searching by "Subject" brings
you to this page. This is the
first page you will see after selecting
to search by subject.
Let's suppose that you decide on the
subject, "Death Penalty." Putting
this in the search box brings up other
terms for you - capital punishment as
an alternative subject! You
can look for more sources on the topic
by clicking on Capital Punishment, which
gives you more choices to narrow down
your search.
The reason for this is a term called
"controlled vocabulary." Controlled
vocabulary is a thesaurus of words put
into the online catalog. Each
item in the online catalog is assigned
one or more subjects for you to use to
search for that item. Sometimes
the term that you use is not the one in
the online catalog. There are
so many words to describe the same thing. This
is why the people who enter the items
into the catalog try and think of as many
terms as they can. It is also
why the online catalog gives you other
terms related to your search term.
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Use
the search by author feature if you are
looking for a book written by a
specific
author but don't know of the title you
are searching for. When searching
by author, make sure you type the last
name first, and then the first name. The
last name is necessary, but the first
name is not. It's best to have
both because your author may have a very
common last name. Having both
the first and last name reduces the chance
that your search will result in an author
with the same last name but is not the
person you were thinking of.
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Searching
by title is the best option if you know
the exact title
or even the first few words.
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Searching
by Call Number is a good option if you've
found a book and wrote down
the call number but can't remember
the
author or the title. It is
also useful when you have a call number
in hand of a particular subject and want
to know what other library materials are
available on that topic. If
you want to see what sorts of items are
nearby your item, this is a good way to
find that out as well. This
will work best if you have the exact call
number but even a partial call number
will bring you a step closer to finding
your book.
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This
option allows you to look for books with
your keyword as the
author, in the title, subject and other
fields in the database. Be
prepared to retrieve lots of items.
One thing to keep your eyes open for
is the following. You will
notice that the title with the yellow
border is available at ELAC library.
The other title is not. We
can however order this title for you via
Intra Library Loan from the other eight
community college libraries in the Los
Angeles Community College District. We
can also order books from the ELAC main
campus library collection which we are
also able to have delivered to SGEC.
Ask the reference librarian about this
service.
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a Copy of this Tutorial |
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