Uses and Limitations of the Library Catalog

Later, near the end of the nineteenth century, librarians began using individual cards which could be properly filed in alphabetical order, and that led to the card catalogs you may have used before. These card catalogs were more easily kept up to date than book catalogs and could be kept in actual alphabetical order.

Catalogs have continued to change. Some libraries experimented with putting their catalogs on microfilm or microfiche for wide distribution to other libraries or library branches. Many libraries today are using online or computer-based catalogs which allow for instant updating of the information.

St. Mary's catalog not only allows you to see the materials it owns, you can also tell whether items are checked out or on the shelf. The catalog also shows items which have been ordered by the library and when they have been received but have not yet reached the shelves. (Look for the notations ON ORDER and JUST RECEIVED where the location and call number of the book would normally be on the screen. If you see these messages on an item you need, check with a librarian to find out when the material is expected to be ready for use. You can ask to have the item put on hold for you so that you can be the first to use it when it is processed.)

Author Searches

Authors are searched in our catalog using the last name first. You can also search for Acorporate authors@ like the Department of Justice or the Police Foundation. Corporate authors can sometimes be difficult to find since it may not always be clear what the exact name of the corporate author is. For instance, the Bureau of Prisons cannot be found under that name as a corporate author because it is listed as United States. Bureau of Prisons.

Why is that? Every author’s name has a particular version that is used in the online catalog so that all material by that author will be found in the same location and not scattered in different areas under different versions of the name. Cross references are often, but not always, put in the catalog to point you to the correct version of the name. We try to use the version of the author’s name that is determined by the Library of Congress to be the correct version.

There are thick books of rules devoted to determining the correct version of a name. Usually this is so simple you don’t even have to think about it, but sometimes it can be very complicated. One of the naming problems that crops up frequently is that of a woman who writes several books under her maiden name and then marries and then writes more books under her married name. What do you do in the catalog to gather all the materials together that she has written so that a single search brings up all of them? Other problems can be more complex and difficult to solve, such as that of the author who writes under several different pen names.

You will notice another tricky thing about finding authors in the catalog when you look for an author with a compound surname like "De La Garza." Since you are supposed to type in the last name first, do you start with "De La Garza, Rudolfo O.," or "La Garza, Rudolfo O. De," or "Garza, Rudolfo O. De La?" In this particular case, it is "De La Garza, Rudolfo O." but not all names work the same way. Sometimes those bits in the middle are part of the middle name and not the last name. Try all possible variations before you give up completely on finding someone.

Another handy trick to know about when you using author searches, particularly when the author is very prolific is the Sort List command. If you are looking at the material written by a particular author and there are many items, it can be confusing to find the one you want. In this case, look at the bottom of the screen to see if the SL (Sort List) option is available. Type in SL and press return. You will then have a choice of sorting the list by date or by title. This is very handy, particularly if you only want to see the most recent material.

When typing in an alphabetical title you should omit the initial articles "a," "an," and "the" so that when searching for The Sun Also Rises, you need only to type in Sun Also Rises. But only do this for initial articles. When you want For Whom the Bell Tolls, type in For Whom the Bell Tolls. You need the "the" in the middle when you doing an alphabetical title search. In fact, since the title alphabetical search simply puts you in a list of the titles of all the materials in the library, you can get away with only typing in the first part of a title, for instance, For Whom the would be enough of the title to get you into the list.

Using the TITLE KEYWORD approach, you type in only the important words in a title leaving out ALL the insignificant words like a, an, the, and, of, etc. that occur in any part of the title, not just the initial articles. The catalog will return a list of only the titles that contain your keywords in any order in any part of the title.

So if you wanted to use the title keyword approach to find For Whom the Bell Tolls, you would type in "bell tolls" or even "tolls bell". Any order of the words will do in this case. But don’t type in the very common words like "the" and "for" and "whom" since they will simply slow down your search.

Very common words don’t add much specificity to the search and will only make the computer churn through a larger volume of words looking for the correct result. In fact, some words are so common that they are not indexed at all. The word "and" is an example of a word that is too common to index.

A title keyword search works best if you can only remember a couple of words in the title but don’t remember the exact title. But you must use the exact form of the word in the title. For instance, typing in "toll bells" or "bell toll" will get you no result. If you are not sure of the exact form of the word you can use a "?" to replace unknown characters. For instance, you can type in "bell? toll?" if you are not sure which of the form of the word is in your title.

First of all you should be aware that our library assigns subject headings to books by using the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Often, the book has already been assigned its subject headings by LC so that all we have to do is copy what they have already done. However, sometimes we have to do the subject assignment ourselves. Again, there are thick books of rules that have to be followed for assigning subject headings.

But one of the main rules is that subject headings should describe the whole book and not just parts of it. So, usually, only very general subject headings are assigned to books. If you do not find specific subject headings for your topic, use a more general approach. Then browse the indexes of books you locate and see if your topic is covered. Some of the indexes we will use in Chapter Six cover books in a more detailed way than the online catalog does. These indexes will also help you locate books on your topic.

However, to find books using the Dynix online catalog on the topic you have selected, you need to use SUBJECT BROWSE or SUBJECT KEYWORD searches. (TITLE KEYWORD searches can also be used as a subject approach if subject keyword does not turn up the keyword you are searching.) Using the SUBJECT BROWSE method, you type in your subject word and the online catalog returns a alphabetical list of the all the subjects in the catalog, locating you in the list alphabetically where your subject lies. Using the SUBJECT KEYWORD method you type in one or more keywords and the catalog returns a shorter list of only those subject headings which contain all your keywords. This is useful when your keyword is not always the first word in the subject heading.

The difference in these two searches can be illustrated by searching for "San Antonio" using SUBJECT BROWSE and then using SUBJECT KEYWORD. Since "San Antonio" appears as the initial words in some subject headings, you will find all these using SUBJECT BROWSE. However, more headings appear using SUBJECT KEYWORD since ASan Antonio@ also appears as a second or third term in some subject headings.

So SUBJECT BROWSE will give you "San Antonio Academy," "San Antonio City Council," and "San Antonio River." Doing a subject keyword search will return all those items plus such things as "Water quality - Texas - San Antonio Region," "Architecture - Texas - San Antonio," and "Ghosts - Texas - San Antonio." The subjects returned from a SUBJECT KEYWORD search are not shown in alphabetical order, but there is an option (SL) to sort the list found at the bottom of screen.

Subject searches are like author searches in that every subject has only one form like every author has only one form. The catalog is arranged this way so that all books on a particular topic are found together. Why is that? It is a convenience for the user of the catalog so that searching one keyword should bring up all the books on that topic.

If many different synonyms were used to describe one subject, then you would have to look up all the different synonyms to be sure you had found all the books on one topic. However, this means that in order to find a subject in the catalog, you need to know what particular word has been used to describe it. Again, as with authors, sometimes cross references will point you in the right direction but sometimes they won’t. In our particular online catalog, few cross references have been added so far.

If the subjects you use in this search don't seem to be giving you the appropriate books, check the Library of Congress Subject Headings located on the small table next to the reference desk. These large red books contain the subject headings used by the Library of Congress to topically classify books and these topics are also used in our own library's online catalog. Bold-face headings are the ones which are used in the online catalog. Many cross references are included in these volumes and they can help you find the proper words to use for our catalog. If you need help finding an appropriate heading, check with a reference librarian.