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ENGL 1T, Fernandez: Find Books

Intended for students in Hilda Fernandez's ENGL 1T class studying slavery and environmental justice.

How to Find Books

Search the Library Catalog to find books, eBooks, and periodicals. You can search by keyword ("everything"), author, title, or subject heading. The results list will give you basic information about each item, including availability. To find out more, click on Details.

Three links provide different kinds of information:

  • Call Number Record shows the basic information about the book, as well as the call number and whether the book is checked out.
  • A Look Inside might show a summary, the table of contents, and/or reviews of the book.
  • The Catalog Record provides all the details you will need for a citation plus the book's subject headings, which are clickable links and may give you ideas for other searches to try.

Books that are available to be checked out are located in the stacks (the bookshelves in the Quiet Study Area). Ask a librarian to point you in the right direction.

A few possibilities ...

Search Terms

A keyword search will find a word anywehre in a record: the title, author, table of contents, subject headings, etc. (the equivalent of searching "everything" in the library catalog). For example, if you search for slavery and united states, you'll retrieve results in which all of these words appear anywhere in the record at least once.

 

To find ALL your search terms, connect them with the word AND:

   sweatshops and nike

 

To find synonyms, connect the synonyms with the word OR:

   children or youth

 

To find variations of a word in the library catalog, add a dollar sign to the word stem:

   slave$  

(This is called truncation and will retrieve any books with the words slave, slaves, slavery, slaveholder, etc.)

eBooks

The Foothill Library has over 12,000 eBooks available for you to use. Go to EBSCOhost eBooks to access Foothill's eBook collection or search the Library Catalog to find eBooks on your topic. The Library Catalog will list all the books the library owns, but you can limit your results to eBooks. 

When you find an eBook in the library catalog, click on the URL icon to open the eBook.

Off-Campus Access

For off-campus access to the online databases and eBooks, you'll need your student ID number and portal password. Make sure you are accessing the databases directly from the library website.