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Find Books at UIS | Request
Books at Other Libraries | The book
I want isn't in I-Share
Find Books at UIS
PrairieCat, the nickname for the book catalog, can be
very easy to search or very complicated, depending on how
precise you want your search to be. If you simply type in
your terms in the Search for: box in the initial
Quick Search screen and press the enter key, the system
will give you tens, hundreds or thousands of results in ranked
order. Or you can be very specific, for instance focusing
your search to film/videos with the keyword counseling in
the subject field.
Useful Tips for All Searches
| Quick Search | Guided
Keyword Search | Limiters | Results
List
Useful Tips for All Searches
- Truncation or Stemming - If you want to find variations
on a particular word, type the stem of the word, followed by a ?, e.g. toxic?
to find toxic, toxicology, or toxicological.
- Exact Phrase - Put your terms in quotation marks,
e.g. "environmental assessment".
- Hyperlinked Subjects - Once you have found a relevant
book, note the subjects given the book. You may click on
the relevant subject to find similar books.
PrairieCat offers two different search screens, Quick
Search and Guided Keyword Search.
Use Quick Search:
- when you know the exact author or exact
title of the book
- when you want to browse subjects
- when you want to do broad keyword searches in
the entire record.
Use Guided Keyword Search:
- when you want to look for words in a particular
field (anywhere in the title, subjects, etc.)
- when you want to combine words in different fields
(author, title, and/or subject)
Quick Search
You will want to structure your query differently for each
of the Search by: choices.
Any Word Anywhere | Start
of Title or Start of Magazine/Journal Title | Boolean
Search (use and, or, not) | Browse
Subject | Browse
Author
Any Word Anywhere
This is the broadest search you can do in PrairieCat,
and the one most similar to an Internet search engine. The
system will rank the results based on the frequency and the
location of your search terms. (Words appearing in the subject
or title field are weighted higher than words in the notes
field.)
- The system will automatically insert an OR in between
words. (Don't include AND, OR, or NOT -- the system will
actually look for those terms in the record.)
- To require that the word appear in the record, put a +
sign in front of the word.
- To require that a word not appear in the record, put an
! in front of the word.
Start of Title or Start of Magazine/Journal Title
If you know the name of the book or periodical you are looking
for, type it in, omitting the initial A, An,
or The. To find A Sand County Almanac,
type sand county almanac.
Boolean Search (use and, or, not)
Boolean logic consists of using connectors to join terms,
or the words you are looking for. PrairieCat uses AND,
OR, and NOT. (Note: connectors do not have to
be in uppercase -- just doing it for clarity. In fact PrairieCat ignores upper or lowercase entirely.)
- If you want both the terms environmental and impact to
appear, use AND, e.g. environmental
AND impact.
- If you don't care whether impact or assessment appears,
use OR, e.g. impact OR assessment.
- And if you want the word pollution to appear, but not
if water is present as well, use NOT, e.g. pollution
NOT water.
- If you type environmental impact, PrairieCat
will return with the error message "The system could
not interpret your search statement." To look for the
exact phrase environmental impact, put quotation
marks around the phrase, e.g. "environmental
impact".
You can structure fairly complicated searches using the connectors,
but if you are going to use both AND and OR
you will need to nest your query via parentheses, so that
the database knows what to look for first. In short, if you
are going to use OR for synonyms, put parentheses around
the OR statement. If we were looking for a record with
either impact or assessment, and
with either environmental or ecological,
you would structure it thus:
(impact OR assessment) AND (environmental
OR ecological)
If we didn't use the parentheses and just typed:
impact OR assessment AND environmental
OR ecological
PrairieCat would read the statement straight through
and retrieve results that had the words impact or assessment
and environmental, but it would also retrieve any result
that had the word ecological, whether the word impact
or assessment was present or not. Putting parentheses
around the OR portion tells the database "Search this
part first, then look for the remaining." So it would
look for impact or assessment and form a set
of results, then it would look for environmental or
ecological and form another set. Then it would compare
the two sets to see which results overlap.
For Boolean logic databases, the results are in alphabetical
order. You can resort the list by author or date, using
the Sort by: pulldown menu at the top of the results
screen.
Browse Subject
If the subject you are looking for is one concept: natural
selection, toxicology, etc., use Browse Subject. Note: if
you are looking for a book about a person, you must type it
in last name, first name. The system will
return an alphabetical list of the Library of Congress subject
headings, starting with your search terms.
If there are no titles matching your search, you are probably
not using the same wording Library of Congress uses for your
topic. Click on the green See Also
button to see suggestions for Library of Congress subject
headings.
Browse Author
For author searches, you need to type in last name, first
name, since the authors are arranged alphabetically by
last name. Use this when you know the exact name of the author,
or you at least know the author's last name and are willing
to browse an alphabetical list.
Guided Keyword Search
The Guided Keyword Search screen allows more precision in
your search. You can specify where in the record you want
your words or phrases to appear. All of these searches use
Boolean logic, but you don't have to type in the connectors.
Instead you can just click on the connector you want.
If your topic is more than one concept, use the Guided Keyword
Search. For instance, if you are looking for books on environmental
aspects of economic development, and you are unsure what the
Library of Congress subject heading for that would be, then
you could type environment? economic
in the Search for: box, tell the system to look for
all of these terms, and Search by: Subject Words.
(Note: Do not type in AND, OR, or NOT in the Search for:
boxes. Use the any of these/all of these/as a phrase
choices instead, or type the terms individually in each of
the Search for: boxes.)
Limiters
There are various ways you can focus your search in PrairieCat. The most common limiters are on the Quick Search screen.
To see all the possibilities, click on the gray More Limits
button at the bottom of the screen. (If you set limits on
this screen, they will remain for all of your searches until
you reset it.)
- You can limit to a particular language, though
for UIS holdings this really isn't a concern since 99% of
our holdings are in English.
- You can limit to a particular location within the
library (archives, government documents, reference, etc.)
- You can limit to a particular year of publication.
- You can limit to a particular primary format (book,
magazine/journal, video, etc.).
Results List
The search results in PrairieCat bring up a brief record
for each item: author, title, publication year, the library
location, call number, and the status of the item. If the
item is on the shelf, the status is Available. If someone
else has the item, the status is Checked out or Renewed.
If there is more than one copy of the item, the system can't
list each status on this screen. Click on the link Multiple
item statuses. Click for details.
To view more information about the item (hyperlinked subject
headings, length, publisher, etc.) click on the corresponding
number to bring up a full record for the item.
You may mark those records you are interested in, and at
the bottom of the search results screen, you may print, download,
or e-mail the records.
See
Help with PrairieCat for more
information on searching PrairieCat, including links to
video demonstrations.
Request Books from Other Libraries
If you can't find what you are looking for in our holdings, click on I-Share Catalog, to search all 65 libraries. You will have to redo your search. Once you have found an item you want, click on Request.
- First, you will be asked to login to the system. Select Univ. of Illinois-Spgfld, type in your Library # on your I-Card (starts with 21412), and your last name.
- Then you'll be asked if you want to request first available item, the only choice given. Click OK.
- Then the request form will pop up. Fill in your I-Card number again, and you can choose whatever pickup location you want. (It's defaulted to UIS.) Then click Submit Request. If it worked, you'll get a confirmation message.
The book I want isn't in the I-Share Catalog.
The largest database we have for books is WorldCat.
It has records and holdings information for over 57 million
titles from libraries around the world. You may request titles
you find in their by clicking on the ILL button and filling
out the form. Just make sure that the title isn't owned by
an I-Share library first. The I-Share Catalog requests
are handled a lot faster. For more information about WorldCat,
see Help
with WorldCat.
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