Finding Exhibition Catalogs in the Libraries
The UC Berkeley libraries do collect exhibition catalogs (sometimes spelled "catalogues" in the UK, Australia, and Canada) but they can be a little tricky to find. The best way is usually to search OskiCat or Melvyl with the name of the artist, and the word exhibitions (not exhibition). It's usually OK to leave out the term "catalog" or "catalogue," since it's not always spelled the same way.
- Example: cao fei exhibitions
If you're looking for exhibitions featuring art from a specific place or time, try searches like this:
- [name of country] exhibitions. Example: china exhibitions or china art exhibitions.
Note: Because of the way the items in OskiCat are described using the Library of Congress classification system, the search terms china art will usually get you more results than chinese art!
You can also use 20th century or 21st century (not "twentieth century" or "twenty-first century") as a search term: art china 21st century exhibitions. In addition, the database Art Full Text also contains digitized exhibition catalogs. (If you're off-campus, you'll need to set up off-campus access to use this tool).
Google Books
Google Books contains millions of scanned books, from libraries and publishers worldwide. You can search the entire text of the books, view previews or "snippets" from books that are still in copyright, and read the full text of out-of-copyright (pre-1923) books. Want to read the entire text of an in-copyright book? Use Google Books' Find in a Library link to locate the book in a UC Berkeley library, or search OskiCat to see if UC Berkeley owns the book.
Why use Google Books?
Library catalogs (like OskiCat) don't search inside books; using a library catalog, you can search only information about the book (title, author, Library of Congress subject headings, etc.). Google Books will let you search inside books, which can be very useful for hard-to-find information. Try it now:
Searching Library Catalogs
Use OskiCat to locate materials related to your topic, including books, government publications, and audio and video recordings, in the libraries of UC Berkeley. OskiCat will show you the location and availability of the items that we own.
- Using OskiCat (but not Melvyl) you can also renew your books online, look up course reserve materials by course number or instructor name, and place holds on items that other library users have already checked out.
Use Melvyl to locate materials related to your topic located at other campuses in the UC system, or worldwide. You can use the Request button to request an item from another library, if we don't own it.
- Using Melvyl (but not OskiCat) you can find articles as well as books, easily format a citation for copying into a bibliography, and see images of book covers, when available. Melvyl will also show you the location and availablity of items that we own.
Melvyl has changed as of January 2012, and now includes many more articles. Detailed Melvyl help