Library Search for Library staff

This page is designed to help Library staff find items on Library Search.

Library Search is a discovery tool and it is designed to give our students a more Google-like experience. This means it is really good when you want to find items by keyword – a keyword can bring back lots of interesting results and then those results are filtered using limiters or facets (e.g. subject, date or format). 

The ways in which Library staff use Library Search and the ways in which students use Library Search are sometimes different. As Library staff, we may need to use Library Search in a slightly different way to find out if we have items in stock, particularly when checking for items on reading lists.

NOTE: sometimes you may hear staff referring to Library Search as Primo. Primo is the name of the system that runs Library Search, just like Leganto is the name of the reading list system and Alma is the name of our library management system. Primo is used in many other libraries but you may not realise this because it is often given a local, more meaningful, name.

All the information on this page refers to searching in Library Search and not through Leganto or the Repository Search in Alma.

How Primo works

Primo consists of 3 separate elements:

• Primo User Interface – this is what our users see and what we call Library Search.
• Library Collections – this is what we call our local library collection or our library catalogue data. These are records that are pulled through from Alma and they are only available to Newcastle University library users.
• Primo Central – Primo Central (sometimes know as Primo Central Index) is a database and it includes records from billions of e-resources. We select what e-resources content is available for our users.

There are endless possibilities for configuring what Primo searches. 

Most libraries offer users the ability to search their local library collections (e.g. "Books+) or Primo Central (e.g. "Articles+) or both (e.g. "Everything").

Want to find out more? This article by Ex Libris gives a good overview of searching in Primo and the difference between the local collection and Primo Central: Primo/Primo Central Searching and Search Results Evaluation.

Finding information

Take a look at these two videos created as part of the Academic Skills Kit (ASK). 

The first is about finding information using Library Search; the second is about the different types of information available. These videos are what students are directed to watch – it's good to know what they will know!

Once you've finished watching these videos, why not take a look at the resource guide that goes with them here?

[Note: If you have worked through Searching for Academic Information or recently completed CS Library Search for Library Staff training, you will have already watched these videos.]

Library jargon

Click on the image below to take a look at the handy glossary of words commonly used in an academic library (Study Skills for Sixth Form, created by our Outreach team).

TOP TIP!

***ALWAYS LOG IN***

When a user logs in to Library Search, they can see their library account information and place requests, etc. But logging in can also have an effect on the search results. 

Certain search results may only be available to specific users – and the only way that Library Search can show those results is if the user is logged in. 

Some suppliers only want libraries who subscribe to their collections to be able to search them. Web of Science is an example – it requires a subscription to access the citations in the database, so it's required in Library Search as well.

Searching for books by title

A title search is the best search to use for books (i.e. when looking for books, use keywords from the title rather than by doing an author search or searching by ISBN).

Try this search...

Imagine you are looking for this book: 

The best way to search for this book is to use keywords from the title. When choosing keywords, think carefully about how common, or popular, particular words are and try to use less popular words instead. 

• Type the following into Library Search using the Everything except articles option: environmental change

In the example above, you could use lake sediments as well as, or instead of, environmental change to reduce the number of results.

Refining your search

If you get too many hits, combine your title search with an author surname.

• Type the following into Library Search using the Everything except articles option: environmental change Juggins

If there is no author, limit your search by date. 

Searching by author

Be careful when you search only by author. Ensure you have the correct spelling of their surname.

Try this search...

• Type the following search into Library Search using Everything except articles: Bridgeland

Do we have any books about the Quaternary by Bridgeland?

Now try this search:

• Type the following search into Library Search using Everything except articles: Bridgland

Is there a book about the Quaternary of the North East by Bridgland?

Refining your search

Be prepared that you may get results for authors with the same surname. Refine your results using the Author/Creator filter on the left side of the Library Search screen. You can also filter by Subject, if you know the area in which the author specialises.

ISBNs – International Standard Book Numbers

ISBNs are used commercially to identify individual book titles. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and format (except reprints) of a book. For example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book will each have a different ISBN.

The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007 and 10 digits long if assigned before 2007.

Books published before 1970 do not have an ISBN.

Try this search...

A student has been asked to look at the DVD for Blade Runner: the director's cut. Her lecturer has given her the ISBN for the video: 1419850024. 

Go to Advanced search on Library Search

Change 'any field' in the first drop down box to ISBN then change 'contains' to is (exact)

Type the ISBN into the search box

What did you find?

The ISBN that the lecturer has given the student is for a DVD of Blade Runner, but it is not for the director's cut version.

Go back to the Simple Search on Library Search 

Type the following into Library Search using the Everything but articles search option: Blade runner cut

You should find two copies of Blade Runner: the director's cut. If you look at the Details pane in the full record of either of these DVDs you will notice that there is no ISBN listed.

ISBN searches can be very effective but, in general, we would use a title/author search first. This is because each different format, or variation of a book, is assigned its own ISBN. If you search by ISBN for a paperback copy of a book and we do not have a paperback copy, then you might assume that we do not have a copy of that book in stock. In reality, we could have a hardback copy of that book, but it will have a different ISBN. 

Also, as in the example above, it could be that when the item was catalogued (for whatever reason) the ISBN was not included and is therefore not available to search.

Checking if a book exists

Sometimes we might get an 'iffy' title that looks a bit odd (something is missing from the bibliographic description, or there is no date or author name, etc.).

Google is a good place to check to see if a book exists and/or to find correct details.

If you can’t find anything, or there is not enough information, on Google you could try looking at Library Hub Discover Service or World Cat.

• Library Hub Discover Service replaces COPAC and SUNCAT and allows you to search the catalogues of UK national, university and specialist libraries through a single interface.

• WorldCat is the World’s largest network of Library content and it is a good place to start if you have an 'iffy' book title because it has a good advanced search option that allows you to search by title keywords and author.

Chapters in books

If you are looking for a book chapter, you should see the word 'in' somewhere in the reference. For example:

Squirrel, S. ‘Dreaming about nuts’ in Birch, S. (ed.) Trees and their inhabitants (Cotswolds Press, 1865).

When searching for chapters in books, always search for the title of the book and not the title of the chapter.

If the details of the book chapters are incomplete, Amazon's "Look Inside" function is useful for 'contents' pages.

When you search for books using the Everything except articles search, you will not find any book chapters because our local collection does not index book chapters.

However, you may find the odd book chapter if you do an Everything search because you are searching the Primo Central Index and Scopus. This is one of the databases to which we subscribe and it does include book chapters.

Book series

Sometimes, you may come across lecturers referring to books in a series by the series title and number rather than by the book title and author (or vice versa).

You can usually find these without too much trouble if the series title is included in the bibliographic information when the item is catalogued, but it is something to watch out for.

Try this search...

Megaw, A.H.S., Notes on recent work of the Byzantine Institute in Istanbul, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1963.

Look at the bibliographic information for this book in the Details section of the Library Search record.

Have you found anything in the Details section that suggests that this item is part of something else?

Look up the item you have found on Library Search. 

Note that... If you are checking a reading list and you notice that an item is published in two different formats, always note down both formats because there may be a reason why an academic member of staff wants to use a particular format. In the example above, it could be that the two versions are slightly different. Often journal articles are heavily edited for publication or they have updated pieces of information that were not included in the original book.

Foreign language items

A particular issue in the humanities is foreign language material (including ancient languages) and possible discrepancies with spellings in titles and author names.

Another possible cause of confusion are diacritics or the little accents that are placed above words (e.g. à). As far as we know, it makes no difference if you search Library Search with or without diacritics.

Top tip!

Lucy Keating’s tip is to try to pick out the nouns rather than the articles in the title of a publication, even if the language is a mystery to you!

Also, if the language uses a different alphabet altogether, then the titles may be transliterated, leading to potential discrepancies. The best thing to do in this case is to search by ISBN (if there is one).

If you are really unsure about foreign language items, then pass them back to the appropriate liaison team and they will check with the module leader if it's from a reading list. Alternatively, if possible, check with a native speaker.

The exception to the rule!

Occasionally, you may find full-text, open access e-books on Library Search if you do an Everything search.

The Everything search looks not only at our local catalogue collection (which includes print and electronic resources that belong to Newcastle University libraries) but also in Primo Central. Primo Central is a centralised Primo index which encompasses hundreds of millions of e-resources. The records include a mix of scholarly material – primarily articles and e-books, conference proceedings and book reviews. Some records include abstracts and some include full text. For this reason, it is always worth checking through the Everything search because you might be lucky!

Searching for journals

Search for journals like you would for books, by title, using the Everything except articles search.

Then use the facets in Resource Type (see below) to limit to Journals.

Journal abbreviations

Some Schools are very keen on abbreviating their journal titles.

Sometimes they use standard abbreviations, or at least well known ones, and sometimes they may abbreviate the title and provide a key to the abbreviations at the beginning or the end of their reading list.

Often it is possible to find the full title of the journal by simply typing the abbreviation into Google. 

Law abbreviations

If you are checking a Law reading list, you should use the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations. You can find details of this and other useful search tips for Law resources on the Law Subject Guide.

Other subject abbreviations 

For other subject areas where the abbreviation is not obvious there are some nice websites that collect journal abbreviations. The University of British Columbia has a handy web page with a collection of common abbreviations:

Journal Abbreviations (ubc.ca)

Top tip!

When searching for journal titles on Library Search, always use the full title and not an abbreviation.

Journal dates (printed)

The holding dates for journals can be confusing. Look at the search result below:

This record is for the print copy of the journal. The volume and date information that appears refers to the holdings on our shelves.

We keep this journal from volume 185 (1995) through to volume 297 (2003).

However, if you click on the title to look at the record you will see that there is another date that has appeared in the section where the individual copies are displayed:

Do not use this date. It is possible that other dates will appear in this section of the record because we have a printed index, or an abstracts volume, that is filed with the journals. With printed journals, always refer to the holdings date on the main search screen or the Details pane (see below).

Details pane in Library Search

To be absolutely sure that you have the correct holdings information for a journal, you should always check the Details pane. In the example below you can see the holdings information quite clearly.

Sometimes there will also be a Notes field which lists any missing issues or you may get information about related titles (i.e. the journal may have changed its name and it will give prior and subsequent name changes).

Journal dates (electronic)

When you search for the Journal of experimental zoology you will find the entry below for the electronic (or online) version.

The date that appears on the results screen is 1904. This date refers to the date of creation of the journal (i.e. when that journal was first published). It does NOT refer to our holdings. 

With electronic journals, you should always go into the record (by clicking on the title) and you will see the actual holdings information for this journal:

In this case, we offer access to the Journal of experimental zoology from 1996 to 2002. The 1904 date appears in the Details pane and it states quite clearly that this is the creation date.

The 'moving wall'

Using the Art journal as an example (below) you can see all the different suppliers listed for the online version of this journal.

Under the first supplier the entry states ‘Most recent 4 year(s) not available’. 

This can cause confusion because it is not always clear when the four years begin and end! You may count back four years, but the item is not available because the four years may start at the beginning of the calendar year rather than move, month by month, throughout the year.

If you come across an e-journal with a 'moving wall' and the item that you want is not available, but it is close in date to the cut-off date, you can contact the e-queries team and they can sometimes make individual journal issues available on Library Search.

[Please note that this is something that we can do as Library staff, but we should not be directing students to the e-queries team for this kind of question.]

Searching for journal articles

When searching in Library Search we would normally search by journal title rather than search for an article.

For example: Bloggs, Joe (2007), 'The life and times of a blue frog', Art Journal 24, 2, 65–70

We would look for the name of the journal, Art Journal, on Library Search using the Everything except articles search, then limit the search to journals using the facets on the left of the screen. (See more information about searching for Journals in Part 3 above.)

We would then check the holdings dates of the journal and note if the journal is electronic or print. With electronic journals you can then follow the path through and find the specific article.   

This may seem like a complicated route to search for articles, but it is the most methodical and efficient way.

Searching by journal title means:

• You will see any print holdings (which are not indexed via an article search).
• You will see a complete picture of which suppliers are supplying a particular article. Sometimes academic staff/students are wedded to a particular supplier (e.g. JSTOR) and assume that we do not have an article because it is not available through their favoured platform. 
• You will see any notes that have been added to a record. Notes could alert you to missing parts or give details of previous (or subsequent) name changes of a particular journal.

​Other things to be aware of when searching for articles:

• The Library subscribes to some databases whose holdings are not indexed by Library Search. This is particularly true of engineering material because Library Search does not index Compendex (also known as Engineering Village) which is a large engineering database.
• This is also true of the main legal databases used within Newcastle Law School – Westlaw and LexisLibrary – although elibrary@ncl.ac.uk are working to add links to the most important titles to assist access.
• Some chemistry databases are not indexed in Library Search.
• Individual reports from the marketing databases, Mintel and Passport, are not indexed in Library Search.

The exception to the rule

If you are not finding a journal article via the normal route it is worth doing a search by article title, using the Everything search.

The Everything search, as well as looking at our local Library Search Index, also looks in Primo Central. The Primo Central Index is a centralised Primo index that encompasses hundreds of millions of records that are harvested from primary and secondary publishers. The records include a mix of scholarly material – primarily articles and e-books, conference proceedings and book reviews. Some records include abstracts and some include the full text. For this reason, it is always worth checking articles via the Everything search because you might be lucky!

Checking if an article exists

Google Scholar is a good place to start if you have checked Library Search (remember to check by journal title first using the Everything except articles option and, if that doesn't work, you can search by article title using the Everything search option).

What is Google Scholar?

Google Scholar is a freely accessible online search engine for scholarly literature across multiple disciplines. It searches through listed digital and physical copies of articles in online repositories, as well as with academic publishers and universities.

General advice would be to always have a 'balanced diet'. Don't rely solely on Google Scholar. Library staff and students should also be using Library databases.

Why not have a go at searching for these articles?

Hint... We get used to seeing references written in the Harvard style and references in other styles can look odd. Also, the lack of punctuation in references can be a problem.

These are all real examples taken from reading lists:

Roy Porter, pre-modernism and the art of shopping, Critical Quarterly, 34 no. 4

Correlation of Reservoired Gases Using the Carbon Isotopic Compositions of Wet Gas Components, James, A.T. Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists 74(9) 1917 1441 - 1458

Oancea, A. (2007). Expressions of excellence and the assessment of applied and practice based research. Research Papers in Education (Vol. 22, pp. 119–137).

Giddings, B and Hopwood, B (2006), 'From Evangelistic Bureaucrat to visionary developer: the changing character of the master plan in Britain Planning Practice and Research’, 21, (3), 337-348

Now try this one:

This came into Library Help not so long ago. Hint... you may need to watch the 'finding an 'iffy' article' video on the previous tab!

EHRHARDT, N. (1984), 'Ein milesischer Festkalender aus severischer Zeit', MDAI(I) 34:371–404.

Non-book material (films, music, etc.)

The best way to search for any item on Library Search is, in the first instance, to keep your search as broad as possible and then to narrow it down using the facets on the left of the screen. You can search for videos and CDs in the same way as you would for a book and then narrow the search using the Resource type facet.

However, if you only want to search for audio-visual materials, you can use the Advanced search on Library Search and narrow your search by Material type:

TOP TIP!

Non-book material can be tricky to find and, if you don't find it through Library Search, it is worth looking at some of the Library's subject guides. We do have access to lots of films and BBC programmes but you won't necessarily find them on Library Search.

These two guides are particularly useful:

• Film Studies
• Media, Culture and Heritage

Conference proceedings

Conference proceedings are normally treated like books (i.e. search for the title of the conference in Everything except articles).

TOP TIP: do not make your search too ‘wordy’. With conference proceedings, it is often better to put a few words from the title and maybe a place name rather than all the information.

Look at the example below:

Concrete for transportation infrastructure proceedings of the international conference held at the University of Dundee, Scotland UK on 5–7 July 2005. Ravindra K Dhir; Michael J McCarthy (Michael John), Sinan Caliskan

Type the following into Library Search using the Everything except articles search option: Concrete for transportation Dundee

Your search results should retrieve two records: an online record and a print record. They are both for the same conference, but the titles look very different.

Conference papers

Papers within conference proceedings can be confusing. 

Papers from conferences are sometimes published as individual articles, with minor edits, in regular journals.

So, you may find references to a conference paper within published proceedings and you may also find references to the same paper published as a standard article in a journal.

It often does not matter which version we have, but sometimes the journal article is considerably different to the original conference paper and the two are not really interchangeable. To be on the safe side, if you do find the proceedings and a journal article, always write down both versions. The student or lecturer can then decide which version they would prefer.

See our topic guide on conferences for more information: http://libguides.ncl.ac.uk/conferences

Exception to the rule...

If you are not finding anything when you search for conferences using the Everything except articles search option, also try the Everything search option.

The Everything search, as well as looking at our local catalogue collection, which includes the print and electronic resources that belong to Newcastle University libraries, also looks in Primo Central. Primo Central is a centralised Primo index which encompasses hundreds of millions of e-resources. The records include a mix of scholarly materials – primarily articles and e-books, conference proceedings and book reviews. Some records include abstracts and some include the full text. For this reason, it is always worth checking through the Everything search because you might be lucky!

Information types quiz

Have a go at our Information Types quiz. 

You may have done this as part of your CS Library Search for Library Staff training.

Identify the source quiz

Know your book chapter from your journal article? Why not have a go at this quiz by Cardiff University Library? Click on the image below to get started. 

Search tips and tricks tutorial

Why not take some time to work through our two part Search Tips and Tricks tutorial?

These tutorials are shared with students as part of their induction. It's good to see what the students see!

Each part can take about an hour to complete. So, get yourself some time off the desk, grab a cuppa and have a go.

[Note: you will have worked through these tutorials if you have recently read through 'Searching for Academic Information' or completed the standard CS Library Search for Library Staff training.]

Click on each part image below to begin...

Searching for academic information

Read through all this? Why not move on to the Searching for Academic Information page next?

Thank you for working through the 'Library Search for Library Staff' page. We hope that you have found it interesting, useful and easy to use.

Please get in touch with the page champion if you have any feedback or comments.