How to Find Books in Sheridan’s BIBCAT Online Catalogue

Basic and Advanced Search

Basic Search works in the same way as Advanced Search, but Advanced Searching allows you to combine fields.

Keyword searches look for the word or words in any part of the cataloguing record (i.e. author, title, subject, publication information, etc.). It is a good place to start if you do not know the author, title or actual subject heading, but it will retrieve more results than a subject search because it is searching all of the possible cataloguing field.

Find a title that looks suitable to your needs. Look at the Library of Congress Subject Terms that are listed in the record. You can click on the Subject Terms to find more records on the topic or you can record it and type it as part of a later search.

Use Author Search when you know who wrote or edited the material. Enter the family name followed by the first name.

Example: shakespeare william

Be careful to spell the name correctly. It is not necessary to capitalize or to include punctuation (periods or commas).
Enter as much information as you know, i.e. copeland

Title Search

Title searching searches for exact words in the order they are entered.

Example: five cs of cinematography

Enter enough of the title to make it unique; you do not need to type the entire title.

'five cs of cinematography' will retrieve Five C’s of cinematography: motion picture filming techniques simplified

Do not enter “a,” “an” or “the” at the beginning of a title.

Example: Lord of the Rings

Series Search

A Series search will find titles that are published as a part of a series.

Example: early childhood education series

Clicking on the Series title will take you to that series title in an alphabetical list of series titles. Click on the series title again to view all of the titles in that particular series.

It is possible to search in the catalogue for journal (also called periodical) titles but not journal articles. Journal articles can be found in the databases (listed under e-resources on the Sheridan Library website).

The same searching rules apply from the title search. Do not capitalize or enter punctuation or articles at the beginning of a title (a, an, the).

Limit

To reduce the number of results that you retrieve you can set parameters by selecting from the drop-down menus.

• Campus: Select Davis or Trafalgar to find titles held by that campus
• Language: Select a language. The Sheridan Library will does not necessarily own titles in all of the languages listed.
• Format: Select maps, computer related materials, music, periodicals, technical reports, videos, DVDs, films or bibliographic materials (books). If you do not limit by format the search will look for records from all formats.
• Publication Year: Entered as year only. Do not include month or date. Example: 2007
• Sort By: The records can be displayed in order by new to old, author, subject, title, relevance or old to new.