Introduction to the Library Catalogue and Databases

What is the Library Catalogue?

The Library provides you with excellent and relevant collections to support your academic journey.  Therefore, the Library catalogue should be your go-to source when searching for information for your assignment or research project.

Home screen, Library catalogue

When you search for information using the Library catalogue you are searching the entire collection of resources that the Library holds or subscribes to. Most of this vast collection comprises scholarly information such as scholarly books and journal articles, the majority of which are not freely available on the internet. Other types of information accessible via the Library catalogue include theses, conference proceedings, reports, and newspaper and magazine articles. While these types of information are not considered scholarly information they may, depending on your discipline or research question, also be important information sources. Watch the videos on the following page to learn more about how to log in to the Library catalogue, search for books, journals and journal articles, and how to use keywords to search for information on a particular topic.

What are Library Databases?

One particular type of resource accessible via the Library catalogue are library databases. Library databases are electronic resources that contain or link to large amounts of information. Many databases focus on information pertaining to a particular field of study (such as health sciences, music, or English literature). Others contain information from several different fields of study (these are called multi- or inter-disciplinary databases). Others concentrate on information of a particular type or in a particular format such as newspapers, market research, or standards. Check out the following pages in this section to identify and learn more about databases in your subject area, inter-disciplinary databases, and databases by function. If you are not sure what type of information is contained in a particular database you can check its scope note.  Scope notes are usually contained in the “About” or “Help” sections of databases. 

Library databases could be considered as smaller, focused collections of information within the overall collection of Library resources – although in reality they are not small as databases may contain millions of items, such as journal articles, newspaper articles, or historical primary sources, depending on the database.

Why search Library Databases?

When you are starting to search for information it is a good idea to firstly search the Library catalogue to get an overview of what is available.  This will give you a good indication of the volume of information that is available on your topic, and also how relevant this information is to your research question.  Depending on the results you receive you might decide to continue with this approach or you may re-think your strategy and limit your search to a particular database or two in your area of focus.  As the information that is contained in databases is limited by a particular scope, such as being subject specific or in a particular format, you may find that you are receiving more relevant results to your search queries by using individual databases rather than searching the entire Library collection via the catalogue. Also, most databases also allow very targeted searching and filtering to further refine your search queries, and subsequently the results.

Important! When you want to access a database always do so via the Library catalogue. Most items in databases are not free of charge, however when you access a database via the Library catalogue it recognises that you are affiliated with the University who have paid the subscription fees to enable you to access all paid content.

To gain full access to a particular database via the Library’s subscription simply type the name of the database into the catalogue search bar and click on the link.