Use the library catalogue

The library catalogue can be used to determine the location and availability of particular items, place holds on items if they are out on loan, and to manage library loans, including viewing and renewing current loans.

The library catalogue can be accessed via any of the PCs in the library or student lab, as well as remotely via the web. This guide has been prepared to assist you in using the library catalogue more effectively and efficiently. If at all confused in using any function of the library catalogue, please seek help from one of the library reference staff.

Before you start

There are two main ways of approaching the catalogue:

You can use the library catalogue to find out if the library has a specific book, or other publication, of which you know all or most of the details, and if it does, to find its location.

or

You can use it in a more general way to search for something, about which you have only vague or incomplete details or no details at all, to see what is available in the library on the desired topic.

If you know all or most of the details

Choose to do an AUTHOR or TITLE search, as this will take you most quickly to the specific item that you want to know about. Remember that an organization or company can also be an author. If searching by TITLE, all the words in the title must be entered in their exact order. The only exception to this title rule is that the words “a”, “an” and “the” may be omitted if they appear at the very beginning of the title.

If you are unsure of the title or author, or have vague and/or incomplete details

Use a KEYWORD (or WORD) search. A keyword is any significant word i.e. any word except for words such as “the”, “a”, “for”, “of”, “and”, and other extremely common words – often referred to as “stop words”.

Unlike AUTHOR or TITLE searching, KEYWORD searching looks for the words anywhere in the catalogue record, including in the author field, the title field, in the subject headings and in any descriptive text attached to the record. For that reason, a KEYWORD search will retrieve a much larger number of entries, including some that may not be relevant. Retrieving a much larger pool of returns through which you need to scan to find relevant titles is the down side of using the KEYWORD search option.

However, using a KEYWORD search is particularly effective where some vagueness exists for two important reasons:

• because the words entered do not need to be in their correct order, nor do all the significant words have to be entered. For example, a search of just the two words “case and audit” (1), entered in that order, will find the book An Audit of the Case Study Method, but entering these words in the same order using a TITLE search will not retrieve the book.
• because a KEYWORD search will enable you to retrieve from across the record, allowing you to search, for example, using one word from the author's name (where you cannot recall the author’s full name) and one word from the title (where very little of the title is known), as in the following example: “porter and advantage” for Michael Porter’s Competitive Advantage.

(1) NB In Keyword searching, the operative word "and" is not assumed, and must therefore be entered between each keyword. If the "and" is omitted the words will be searched as an exact phrase eg. "court supreme australia" (exact phrase) will not find Supreme Court of Australia, but "court and supreme and australia" will.

Advanced searching

Innopac now offers more advanced searching with the following functionalities: adjacency, truncation, Boolean operators, proximity and field searching. These searching options provide greater flexibility in setting out a search strategy, and produce greater relevancy in the search results.

Limiting your search

You can further refine search results by setting predefined limits, which will allow you to limit results retrieved by: item location; words in title, author or subject; year of publication; material type; book/magazine; language; and publisher.

Using this option, a search result on marketing management can, for example, be limited to books held in the Melbourne Business School library published after 1998.

Searching by subject

Subject searching is the most challenging method of approaching the catalogue, and the method with the greatest potential to cause confusion and error if not properly executed. With care however, subject searching is by far the best means of retrieving the most relevant and complete coverage of a specific subject.

A SUBJECT search looks for the words you have entered only in the subject headings that have been assigned by library cataloguers to the books in the catalogue. These subject headings are standardized terms, drawn from the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) classifications scheme. They will not always equate with natural language descriptions of a subject, nor with the terms that you will have chosen to enter.

However, as they are “standardized” across the catalogue, and consistently applied, once discovered they can be used to retrieve all the holdings on a subject, regardless of the title assigned by the author or other varying descriptive text.

To discover the appropriate subject heading:

If using the telnet OPAC version of the catalogue, do a KEYWORD search using natural language terms and look through the retrieved titles for a highly relevant result. Display the “full record” for that title, and either:

• note the term(s) located against the “subject” field in that catalogue record
• or press “s” for “show similar items”, which will take you to another screen where the pertinent subject headings will be listed for your selection.

In the WEBPAC version of the catalogue the process for conducting a SUBJECT search is much simpler because once the full record for a book is on display, the subject headings are immediately displayed as usable links that can be activated to take you directly to all the books that share that subject heading.

Searching by call number

The McLennan Library uses the Dewey Decimal Classification scheme to allocate the numbers at which the books on particular topics are shelved.

Searching by CALL NUMBER may be useful in certain circumstances, but should be used with great caution. While call numbers can assist in locating the shelf location number for books on particular topics for browsing purposes, because classification numbers have undergone regular and repeated recasting to accommodate emergent subjects, they will not always collect all the books on a given subject at the same Dewey location.

The call numbers begin with three digits that identify the subject area followed by a decimal point, and further numbers to subdivide the subject area. The Dewey string of numbers is followed by the first four letters of the author’s surname, or in the case of an edited text or collection, by the first four letters of the title.

As Dewey call numbers are not unique, you will need the entire call number and the letter suffixes to locate a book on the shelf e.g. 658.4038 CASH

An 'f' (folio) in the book location indicates that the book is larger then an average sized book and is shelved in a separate folio sequence located at the end of the collection. e.g. f 004.068 WISE.

Searching by other options

International Standard Book Number [ISBN] or International Standard Serial Number [ISSN] are unique codes assigned to a book or serial to identify the publisher, title, volume/edition numbers, etc. As these numbers are not always known to the searcher, these search options are rarely used.