Master of Counselling
Using Library Catalogues

Catalogues: The Keys to Library Collections

There are four key things to know about library catalogues. First, library catalogues index the holdings of particular libraries, excluding the contents of journals. In general you may use catalogues to find books, journals, videos, conference proceedings, government documents, and other formats of teaching tools and information sources.

Materials described in catalogues provide introductory, retrospective, survey, in-depth and summary information. Brief and in-depth overviews of a topic can be found in subject-specific and general encyclopedias and dictionaries in the reference collection. In some disciplines, books remain a preferred source of information, especially for those looking for in-depth treatments of particular subjects.

Keep in mind that if currency is an important aspect of your information needs, the book literature tends to be more dated than the journal literature. However, because significant amounts of collected wisdom in almost all disciplines reside in printed and online books, the book literature remains valuable and should not be overlooked.

Secondly, library catalogues generally do not index individual articles contained in journals. They index journal titles, allowing you to find out whether or not a library holds any issues of a particular journal title, but if you are looking for journal articles, the best approach is usually to use journal indexes or databases.

Thirdly, while their external interfaces may differ, most of today's library catalogues work in the same way. Have a look at the different ways to search the following catalogues: University of Lethbridge, University of Alberta, University of Calgary. Your options for searching include Author, Title, Subject, and Keyword indexes. Searching for works by a particular author, for instance, requires searching for the author's name in the Author index -- enter the last name first, followed by the first name or initial.

Catalogues also tend to offer the same ways to limit your search. One way is to specify limits as part of your initial search (e.g., see the "Limited to:" options in this Advanced Keyword search page. Another way is to do a search, and then whittle down the results by applying further limits (e.g., click the LIMIT THIS SEARCH button at the top of this results page for a subject search on "counseling".

Finally and perhaps most importantly, library catalogues usually offer at least two different ways to look for information by subject. All catalogues offer Keyword searching, which today's users are very familiar with. In addition, most academic libraries in North America use the same controlled vocabulary (the Library of Congress Subject Headings) to govern the contents of their catalogue's Subject index. This means that if you find a particularly useful subject heading in one university's library catalogue, you can likely reuse it in the catalogue of a different university. The benefits of using both keyword (uncontrolled) and subject heading (controlled) searches when researching a particular subject or topic is covered in the Basic Searching section of this tutorial.

Image of taking notes Citation information for books: author, title, place of publication, publisher, year.

Citation information for journal articles: author, title of article, title of journal, volume, issue, page numbers, year.

In addition to the above four key points, it is worth noting that your access to the research literature is not limited to what the University of Lethbridge Library has licensed access to, or owns. If you become aware of a published book or other item of possible research interest that is not listed in the U of L Library catalogue, please consider recommending it to the Library for purchase. If you would like to obtain an information source not available locally, you may submit an interlibrary loan request which is covered in more detail in the section of this tutorial on Interlibrary Loans. As well, keep in mind that many catalogues offer pointers on how to input search terms most effectively, as well as Help pages which explain some of the more complex ways to search.

Practice Exercise

The University of Lethbridge Library catalogue currently has more than 700 items under the subject heading "psychotherapy". How many of those 700+ items were published in 2008 or later? How many books are available in the University of Calgary library catalog under the same subject heading? How many of the items in the University of Calgary catalogue were published in 2008 or later? How about at the University of Alberta library? How do the results of your searches for "psychotherapy" at these three libraries compare?

Discussion Questions

  1. Which aspects of the journal literature might a library catalogue help you locate?
  2. Are books a relevant source of information in the field of counselling psychology? Why, or why not?
  3. What are some similarities and differences of different academic library catalogues?

Additional Sources of Guidance

Maintained by Rumi Graham

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