LibGuides: EDU 8302: Principles of Educational Research: Finding Books Using the Catalog

Finding Books

This is a view of some of the books on the third floor of the Library

To find books, you need to use the Library catalog. The Library Catalog can be used to locate books by title, author, and subject. It contains records for books in the West Library, electronic books (eBooks), and multimedia resources (DVD, CD, other audio recordings)

Where is the Library Catalog?

On the main library page, select Books & More, then enter a search term in the search box.

Screen capture of the drop down for books and more on the West Library website.

West Library Home Page

Search Results Page

The image above is the search results page for a search using the terms positive reinforcement and teacher

How Books in the Library are Arranged

Books in the West Library are arranged by the Library of Congress Classification, explained below.

Library of Congress Classification Outline
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress.
The Library of Congress Classification (LCC) is a classification system that was first developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to organize and arrange the book collections of the Library of Congress. It has since been adopted as the standard classification system of many university libraries, including the West Library at Texas Wesleyan University.

Finding Books in the Library

Once you have found a book on the results list that you wish to find, you need to do the following.

If the book is in the library, it will show up in the list like the example below
The example below contains the Call Number, which is the number that you need to have to find this book
The example below also tells you the location of the book. It is on the 3rd Floor

The books on the 3rd floor are arranged in a specific manner. Our Library uses the Library of Congress Classification system, which assigns a letter or letters to specific subjects.

4. Go to the 3rd Floor and find the area that contains the books that have a classification number that begins with the letter L

Library of Congress Classification

Where the Education books are in the Library of Congress Classification

Location: All books listed are in the General Collection, which is on the Third Floor of the library. In addition to these books, you can search the library's catalog for your topic of interest. You may also browse the relevant sections of the library.

L: Education
LA: History of Education
LB: Theory and Practice of Education
LC: Special Aspects of Education
LC8-59 Forms of Education
LC65-245 Social Aspects of Education
LD-LG Individual Institutions
LT: Textbooks

Finding ebooks

If your book is an ebook, it will say Go to eBook

When you click on the link, it will take you to the E-Book. You can now do the following:

You can read the entire e-book online without checking it out.
You can select and Print out selected pages of the book
You can select and save selected pages from the book
You can select and e-mail selected pages from the book

Pages available

This shows that for this e-book, called A Kit Bag for Promoting Positive Behaviour in the Classroom, 100 pages from this book may be printed