Online Catalog

What is the Online Catalog?

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 2400 items at the South Gate Education Center Library. You can search the online catalog from the library, as well as from any computer with 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: Words or Phrase (keywords), Author, Title and Subject. 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 option.

Starting Point

This is the main online catalog page. This is your starting point. From here you will start your search. You can always hit the "Go Back" button to go back one page or "Search/Home" to return to the main online catalog page. Please make sure you have chosen "East Los Angeles College South Gate Education Center Library" to see what is available in our library.

Searching by "Words or Phrase"

This option allows you to look for books with your keyword or phrase as the author, in the title, subject and other fields in the database. Be prepared to retrieve lots of items.

Searching by Author

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.

Searching by Title

Searching by title is the best option if you know the exact title or even the first few words. Do not use A, An or The if it is the first word of the title.

Searching 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.

How do I know if you have the book?

All titles retrieved by the online catalog are books that are available at the Library you searched. Once the online catalog has retrieved the books, look out for the following: Call number and location.

If the online catalog is unable to retrieve any titles, you may want to search in the libraries at other campuses. We can order any circulating title for you via the Intra Library Loan service 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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