Writing Across the Curriculum: Library Resources for Writing Intensive (W) Courses: Finding Books

SOUTHcat: USA Libraries' Catalog

The library catalog contains records for books, e-books, journals, CD-ROMs, CDs, DVDs, videos, and government documents held by all locations of  the libraries at the University of South Alabama. It does not list journal articles.

SOUTHcat can be searched in many different ways, but the most useful search types for students are:

• keyword: example -- math? history
• Title: example -- Sun Also Rises (when a title starts with "a", "an" or "the", the initial article is not included in the search)
• Author: example -- Twain, Mark (last name is first)
• Subject: example -- Epilepsy in children --Psychological aspects. (These subjects are either Library of Congress or Medical Subject Headings (MESH) so students aren't likely to know them but they will run across them when searching the catalog.)

The University Libraries have been buying electronic books recently; currently we have approximately 300,000 ebooks. Many of these can be accessed through SOUTHcat and will show up in the results of a search. Not all of our ebooks, however, are in SOUTHcat.

Finding Ebooks not in SOUTHcat

• The Marx Library's Electronic Books page: http://library.southalabama.edu/ebooks.html
• The Biomedical Library's Looking for E-Books page: http://biomedicallibrary.southalabama.edu/library/?q=ebooks