Finding Resources

Finding a book

To search for the following title in LibrarySearch, search for 'study skills handbook'. If the title of the book is quite general, you could also add the author's surname eg 'study skills handbook cottrell'. This will find fewer, more relevant results.

Cottrell, S. (2013) The study skills handbook. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Sometimes, there will be multiple editions of the same title. Always try to read the most up-to-date, but with many subject areas, there can be little difference between editions.  Where we have multiple editions, you'll see a single item in the results list but it will indicate that there are multiple versions available. Click through to view all versions.  By default, LibrarySearch will list these from newest to oldest so the most recent version will display at the top of the screen.  Check carefully to ensure that you borrow the correct edition of the book you're after.

In the above example, you're looking for the 2013 edition: Cottrell, S. (2013) The study skills handbook. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

It would look like this in LibrarySearch:

You can see at-a-glance from the results that this title is available to borrow as availability is shown in green, and you can also see the location and call number i.e. Lending Collection and 378.17 COT (Remember: you must be logged in to see accurate item availability!)

To see the full details, click on the title of the book or the Availability link and scroll down to the Get It tab - from here you'll be able to see how many copies of the book are available and what the loan policy is, eg 1 week loan:  

To borrow a book: take a note of the call number ie 378.17 COT. The Lending Collection is on Floors 3 and 4 of the Library, with the Law Lending Collection located at the end of Floor 4. To borrow, self-issue machines are located on Floors 1, 3 and 4, but please ask at SEZ if you need assistance.

Is it available as an ebook?

If the book is available as an ebook, it will have a link 'Check for online access':

Follow this link and scroll to the View It tab where the link(s) to the eBook platform(s) are.  If prompted to login, enter your network username and password.‌

LibrarySearch is searching over 185,000 eBooks and millions of journal articles at once so is the quickest and easiest way for you to find online items.  Whether you're looking for a book or a journal article, the process is the same.‌

Finding a journal article

You may have a citation that looks like this:

Loes, C.N., Salisbury, M.H. and Pascarella, E.T. (2015) ‘Student perceptions of effective instruction and the development of critical thinking: a replication and extension’, Higher Education, 69(5), pp. 823-838. doi: 10.1007/s10734-014-9807-0.

Again, you would either pick out keywords from the article title and add in author surname, or search for the article title.  In this example you are looking for ‘Student perceptions of effective instruction and the development of critical thinking: a replication and extension’

As you know that this is journal article, you can add additional filters from the right-hand menu if required.  You can select to only return Full text Online results and only Content Type = Articles. 

The same journal article can often be available from multiple publisher platforms and this will be indicated in the results list as 'Multiple sources exist. see all'

As with the eBook example, you click through to the Details screen by clicking the title and scroll down to the View It tab. From the View It tab you can click on the link to go directly to the full-text article on the publisher platform.  You may be prompted to login again with your network username and password before accessing the article.

Clicking the 'Check for Online Access' link will open the service page listing all available links to the full-text.  If only one source exists, clicking the link will take you straight there.