The Basics of Searching Library Catalogs

Let’s use the Library of Congress as an example library database. At the home page (http://catalog.loc.gov), select “basic search”. This screen brings up the option to search by title, author/creator, subject, call number, LCCN, command keyword and keyword. For the sake of simplicity, we will focus on title, author/creator, subject and keyword. You will also notice that below the search area is an explanation of each search term. Remember, library catalogs are supposed to be easy to no matter what your computer or library expertise.

Title

If you have an idea of a title, or know of an exact title, enter it here. You can drop any initial the’s , an’s or a’s. You can also drop the last few words of the title, as the catalog will bring back an alphabetized list of titles either way. For example, if I wanted to look up the title, The Female Volunteer; or the Life and Wonderful Adventures of Miss Eliza Allen, A young Lady of Eastport, Maine, I would enter only: Female Volunteer; or the Life and Wonderful Adventures of Miss Eliza Allen, A young Lady of Eastport, Maine. After entering this title, I get one record.

When going into the actual library record, you can select either “brief record” or “full record”. Since you want all of the information that you can get, I’d suggest that you always select full display. In the full record, I can see many different things about the book: Personal Name, Main Title, Publish Date, and Subjects. Personal Name is helpful, as this will show that “official name” of the author, if you are unsure. Main Title and Publish Date are also valuable pieces of information. Subjects comes in handy when you need to know what the book is really about. For example, with this particular title, the subject, Young Women--Fiction is displayed. Bingo. So, now I know that this book really does not fall into my subject, as it a work of fiction, rather than a non-fiction travel narrative.

Author/Creator

Let’s say that you want to look up every book by one particular author. Using the Author/Creator option, you can do just that. In addition, this can help you to determine an “official” (otherwise known as "uniform") name for an author. I will use Mrs. Henry Beck as an example. After plugging in this name into Author/Creator and getting no results, I decide to do a title search to see if this book is even in the Library of Congress catalog. Yes, I find out the Library does hold this title, but the author that they use is “Beck, Henry Harrison, Mrs., b. 1861.” So, knowing the author’s name used in the Library of Congress’s catalog, I can now go back and see how many books they have of hers that might be of interest to me. Another handy piece of information is that the author field in library of catalogs usually displays the birth (and death, if applicable) dates of an author. Thus, I know now that Mrs. Henry Harrison Beck was born in 1861.