If you know the title of a book, movie, or other type of research material, you can do a keyword search in Simple Search and sort through the results, or you can use specific features in the Advanced Search to get you directly to the item record. The same works for a course reserve, though we also have a list of course reserves linked in the box below.
Advanced Search is a great way to search a known title, author, or a specific collection of materials. From the UC Library Search page, you can select the Advanced Search link to the right of the search box. Advanced Search allows you to search the following specific collections, also called scopes, including:
Select the appropriate radio button of the collection you want to search, use the various drop down menus to search specific fields, and add the title, author, subject, or keyword to search. Please note you can focus in on a certain format, language, and time frame as well.
In this example, the search is for a known book so we select the Library Catalog scope, add the book title to the Title field, add the author to the Author field, and select Book as Material Type so that the search retrieves this specific book; we are NOT interested in critiques, book reviews, movies, or any other material that contains the words in the title since the Simple Search would search the title as keywords. Only one result is returned, and it's the exact book the we searched for.
