Catalog tips
Here are a few helpful techniques for catalog searching:
1. Find the right subject
If you are doing research on a particular topic, you will want to use a subject search instead of keyword. However, the Library of Congress subject headings are not always intuitive, so knowing the correct wording for a subject search can be very important for maximizing your search results. If it seems like you are not finding enough books on your topic, try harvesting subject headings. If you have one book on your topic that you know is helpful, or a book that is like the books you are looking for, find it in the catalog and bring up the record. In the book's bibliographic information there will be a list of subjects that correspond to this title. Take a look at the example below:
The two subjects for this title are "Feminism" and "Women in Christianity." While "Feminism" is a fairly intuitive subject, "Women in Christianity" is one that is more unique to the Library of Congress nomenclature. Now that you've found the subject, you can click on it to find similar books.
2. Sort and Limit
You may find in that your search has returned so many results that it is impractical to go through them all. This can be especially common with keyword searching. If you find yourself with too many results, try limiting and/or sorting them. One way to do this is by adding limit and sort options after your search.
This search for commentaries on the book of Matthew, for example, has 221 results, which is a lot to read through. However, I can use limit and sort to help reduce the list to the titles I want. In this particular case, I could use the language limit so I only see books in English. I could also use the date range, so that I only see books that have been written in the last 10 years. If I wanted to look at the most current titles, I could change the sort option from "relevance" to "publication year descending," which will change my list so it begins with the most recently published title.
3. Export
Save some time by exporting the bibliographic information on the books you find in the catalog. Collecting this information every time you select a book in the catalog is a good practice to adopt, even if you don't end up using the book. Using the Select an Action box, you can choose between a variety of ways to collect your results:
