The Library Catalog scope is where you'll find records for printed and electronic books that are owned or provided by the University Libraries. In the Simple Search box you can enter terms such as:
- words from the book title
- author names
- publisher name
- words from series title and number
- words from subject headings
- ISBN
In the Advanced Search box you can do more specific searches.
Print Books vs E-Books
When you Refine results by Resource Type and choose Book*, the system doesn't distinguish between hardcopy books and e-books. To limit to e-books, add the facet Available Online. (See image.) To limit to print books, add the facet Physical Copy. In cases where we have both a physical copy and an e-book version, they will often share the same bibliographic record (see note below) and be shown together in the full record display.
* TIP: To be thorough it's a good idea to also select the "Other" category under Resource Type. A number of catalog records for books have a coding error that prevents the system from identifying them as Books. These will be corrected in time.
- When you're searching only in the Library Catalog, you're NOT searching in the full text of a book - just the catalog records that describe the books. Some newer catalog records include chapter titles from a book's table of contents, and perhaps a brief summary or publisher blurb of the book.
- If you're looking for book chapters, try searching in the Articles & More scope, which indexes chapters from many (but not all) e-books available to you. You can then limit your results to Book Chapters using the Refine menu. Remember that this database only covers e-books, not print books.
- If you're looking for a specific book, choose the Library Catalog scope. If you use the Everything scope you will also find reviews of the book, but we may not actually own the book itself. This can be confusing.
- Note: The Ex Libris Primo system utilizes community-shared bibliographic records for most electronic resources -- in other words, they are not cataloged locally, but rather activated within a common knowledge base. Unfortunately, many of these shared records are poor quality, and may lack useful or essential metadata such as subject headings, content notes, and even author names and subtitles. This is especially true of vendor-supplied records for "temporary" e-books that we have access to but do not own outright. The UT Libraries cannot control the quality of these records or replace them.
