UNST Immigration, Migration, and Belonging - Cultural Leader Gallery Walk Assignment: Searching Library Catalog
The Library Catalog
This page will give you a brief introduction for searching the library catalog. The catalog can be a good place to start searching. The catalog is the broadest search you can do through the library, searching for many different types of resources that our library holds, and some that are available from other libraries. If you are looking for a more focused search, especially for scholarly articles or newspapers, the Recommended Databases tab in this guide can help you with that.
Here is a link to our How-to guides to further help you navigate the library:
Searching the Library Catalog
Search: To search the library catalog for resources on an individual, start at the library homepage and enter your cultural leader's name. For this example, we will use activist and author Cornel West. Once you enter search terms, hit enter or the click the search icon:
Sign-in & Filters: Once your search loads, you can immediately begin to look at the results. It is a good idea to sign in to make sure you have access to all the resources. You can filter your results by using the check boxes on the left below the section "Refine My Results":
Two Important Filters: The "Resource Type" filter allows you to limit your search to types of resources such as: print books, eBooks, articles, book chapters, etc. The "Date" filter allows you to limit results to resources published within certain dates. This is especially useful when you are looking for current information. In this example, if I wanted to search for resources published in the last 10 years, I would change the first date to 2015 and click "Refine":
PSU Library Catalog Tour Video
Using Author and Subject Links
Another way to explore and focus the resources for your cultural leader is to use Author and Subject links. In the example for Cornel West, by clicking on this Library record for this eBook I can explore the authors (in this instance one of the authors is Cornel West) and the subjects related to this resource:
Author: Once you click on the title of the resource to open the record, you can click on author name links to explore the resources by author. Note: this will only work if your cultural leader is an the author of the resource:
Subject: Or, you can click on subjects in the record as well. In this case Cornel West has two subject headings (listed at the bottom) related to his name:
