Using ANTPAC, Melvyl and Subject Guides
Discovery Task 6: Saving The Best For Last !
But what about books you say? You have learned about web evaluation and search engines, background reference sources, and article databases, and other online library resources, but what about the books?
The physical UCI Libraries are made up of the Langson Library, which contains materials in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Science Library, which contains materials from all the sciences, and the Grunigen Medical Library, which contains an extensive medical collection. All the materials can be accessed using the Libraries’ online catalog, ANTPAC. In addition to books, the Libraries have videos, maps, government documents, audio recordings, music scores, newspapers and journals. All the Libraries’ electronic resources are in ANTPAC as well.
In addition, as a UC student, you are eligible to use material from all the other UC campuses, which can be accessed and requested from Melvyl, the UC-wide catalog.
You will need to activate your student ID to use as your library card at one of the Libraries’ loan desks before checking out a book or requesting one from another campus.
Using ANTPAC
Unless you know exactly the title or the author of the book you are searching for, it is best to start with a keyword search. Keyword searching gives the greatest flexibility for finding your words. From the records you find using your keywords, you can find the precise subject heading for your topic and then search using that subject heading to refine your results.
For example: Look at a search for materials using the keyword cyberculture in ANTPAC.
Let’s take a look at one of the records from the search.
Important
tips:
You will need the location and call number to find the book in the Libraries. Also check the status to see if the book is checked out or available.
If the book has a link to the electronic version of the table of contents, use this to browse the contents of the book.
An important part of the record is the Subject Heading list. We found this book by doing a keyword search for cyberculture. If you look at the full record you can see that the official Library of Congress subject headings for this book are Computers and Civilization or Internet—Social Aspects or Cyberspace—Social aspects. These subject headings are standardized words or phrases that are used to describe the subject matter of books. Use the linked subject headings to find all the books in ANTPAC with that subject heading to lead you to more materials on your topic.
Browsing the shelves—virtually
In addition to using the subject headings link to find more materials on your topic, you can ‘browse’ through the shelves around a book. Click on the Call # in the record and you will get a listing of all the books on the shelves around that book.
Browsing the results:
Of course, you are also welcome to come into the library and browse the
shelves in reality!
ANTPAC is available from the libraries home page or at www.antpac.lib.uci.edu.
Using your research topic, do a keyword search in ANTPAC to find books and other material from the UCI Libraries. You may need to try different keywords to get satisfactory results. Answer the questions on the worksheet.
Even more books—Using Melvyl
As a UCI student you have access to the collections at all the UC libraries. To find material at other campuses go to Melvyl, the online catalog for the UC system. http://melvyl.cdlib.org/
Since we know from ANTPAC that one of the subject headings for our cyberculture topic is Internet—Social aspects, we can do a subject search in Melvyl.
You can do keyword searches in Melvyl as well, but if you know the subject heading it will help direct and focus your search. For example, if you search the term cyberspace as a keyword you will get over 700 items, but as a subject heading you refine it down to 250 items. Searching for the subject cyberspace--social aspects refines it further to about 100 items. Conversely, if you do a subject search and get poor results, try using your terms as keywords.
Use the drop down box to choose “Subject” and enter internet social aspects and ‘yes’ to words as a phrase.
Let’s
take a look at one of the records from this search.
This book
is available at UC Berkeley, but by clicking on the 
button you can ask
that the book be sent to you here at UCI. This can take
anywhere from 2-10 days, depending on where the material is located, so you
need to leave time in your research process if you are requesting material
from other campuses.
You cannot request material from Melvyl that is available at UCI.
Research tip—Subject Guides
Subject guides, prepared
by the subject librarians, provide a detailed list of databases, e-journals,
Internet resources, and reference materials in
a particular field. This is a great resource to use when starting your research
process and for more direction as you delve deeper into it. From the Libraries’ home
page www.lib.uci.edu choose the link for Subject
Guides.
The History subject page:
Browse through the subject guides and find which one would best fit your research topic.
Most important tip ever!
If, at
any point in your research, you need more help, librarians are available
to help. Just click on the 
button to see the many ways to
contact us.
To
access the Humanities Core Course Library web page for all the Discovery
Tasks and other important links, go to http://course.lib.uci.edu/hu/writing/humcore/ .
Questions, comments, problems? Contact Cathy Palmer, UCI Libraries
(cpalmer@uci.edu)