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.
Sample Searches in OskiCat
1. keyword search with truncation:
keywords: monsters in literature
modify search
language: english
2. keyword search; then try a useful subject term:
keywords: godzilla*
* = truncation symbol/wildcard (child* = child, childs, children, childish, childhood...)
click on the title of the record to see official subject headings and other key terms you can use to find more items:
subject: godzilla
searching by subject keywords brings up a list of the heading and subheadings, for example: gozilla (fictitious character) and godzilla films
another example:
keywords: vampire* movie*
subject: vampire films
3. using quotes to keep terms together as a phrase:
mad scientist*
"mad scientist*"
other features:
- modify your searches or use advanced keyword searches to limit to English, to specific years of publication, to a library location, by format (videos, maps, etc.)
- save items to a list and e-mail the list to yourself
- make sure you know the library location, call number and availability (checked out or not?) of the item(s) you want
11 million items and 29 libraries not enough? Try MELVYL, catalog for 10 UC campuses!