Books are essential resources in the humanities, offering comprehensive insights into emerging issues and scholarly debates. Academic books are typically published as monographs—focused works by a single scholar—or as edited volumes featuring multiple contributors addressing a topic from diverse perspectives. Most are published by university presses or independent scholarly publishers and undergo peer review. For undergraduate research, it’s not necessary to read an entire book; consulting the table of contents can help you identify relevant chapters. Bibliographies are also valuable tools for discovering additional sources and tracing scholarly conversations.
TIP: The Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Service enables UC students, faculty, and staff to borrow materials from other libraries that UCI Libraries does not own or subscribe to. For more information about ILL services, click here. You can also fill out a blank ILL request form. (This link will ask you to authenticate with your UCI net ID and password).
You can use UC Library Search to find books in both electronic and print format—perfect for when you need something specific. But don’t underestimate the fun of browsing the shelves in person—you might stumble across a book you didn’t even know you were looking for!
At UCI Libraries (and most college libraries in North America), books are organized using the Library of Congress Classification system—basically a big, detailed way of sorting knowledge by subject.
If you're looking for books on film and media, start with the PN call number section (part of the Languages & Literature category). That’s where you’ll find books on motion pictures, television, and radio. For more technical topics like cinematography, special effects, or projection, check out the TR section.
Happy shelf browsing—you never know what hidden gems you’ll find!
A broad collection of journals and ebooks with emphasis on humanities and social sciences. Publishers include numerous university presses and scholarly societies.
Provides access to scholarly journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to journal articles, users can access book chapters, ebooks, and primary source documents.
Many books on film and media studies are edited volumes of essays by different authors or contain information on a number of films or shows. Depending on how they were cataloged, the records that represent information about scholarly books do not always reveal this content. Searching these tools can be a great way to search for information in books as they search each word on every page of the scanned items.
