Finding Information
	Obtaining the Item

Items listed in the HSU Library Catalog have call numbers, which indicate where the items are located in our Library.

Items listed in other catalogs can be ordered on Interlibrary loan. Another section of this OWL explains how to find items in library catalogs.

Items listed in our Databases may or may not be available in our Library. Most of our databases cover periodicals. However, some cover other types of information in addition or instead. Examples of these other types of publications are books, conference papers, chapters in edited books, publications in series, or documents published by government agencies.

To find a source you want in the Library, the first thing you must do is to recognize what type of publication it is. How to Interpret Search Results has guidelines for the most common types of publications. It also tells you how to determine whether the material is in our Library or not. If our Library does not have the item you are looking for, you will probably be able to get it on interlibrary loan.

Many database, indexes, and abstracts give the names of their source publications in abbreviated form. You need to decode the abbreviations in order to find the items you want. Finding Title Abbreviations lists several sources, both print and online, that can help you find what abbreviations stand for. If you don't find the abbreviation you are looking for, resist the temptation to guess. Sometimes you will be right, but not always. A librarian may be able to help you decode difficult abbreviations.

Where to look to see if our library has the item you want depends on the type of item you are looking for:

• If the item you want is a chapter in a book, look up the title of the book (not the chapter!) in the HSU Library Catalog.
• If the item you want is published by an agency of a government other than that of the United States or California, look it up in the HSU Library Catalog. If you need help with how to look it up, please ask a librarian.
• If the item is published by an agency of the United States or the California state government, ask a librarian for help in finding it, or consult our Government Documents pages.
• If the item you want is a periodical article and you found the citation in a database, you have several options for obtaining the article:
  • The fulltext of the article may be linked to the citation information in the database you have searched.

    In that case, all you need to do is click on the link to the fulltext, and it will be displayed. If the article is in pdf format, you will need a program such as Adobe Acrobat in order to display it.

  • The fulltext of the article may be in another database that our library subscribes to.
    

    In that case, there may be a link in the citation information for the article, that looks like one of these:

    Library Holdings

    Clicking on this link will open a window

    • with links to databases with the article in fulltext, if any.
    • with a link to the HSU Library catalog, if the journal is listed in our catalog. Clicking this link will take you to the catalog record for the journal. You will need to check the date of your article against the dates we own to see if we have the article in print.
      
    • with a link to our Inter-library loan form if there is no fulltext for the article in any of our databases and no record for the journal in the HSU Library catalog. Interlibrary loan enables you to request a copy of the article from another library at no cost to you.
      

Not all of our databases have these links. If there is no link in the article record of the database you are using, try this: open a new window in your browser, go to the library homepage, and click on the link to the Journal and Newspaper Finder. Enter the title of the journal you are looking for (NOT the article title!). The Journal and Newspaper Finder will return the same information as above.

• If the item you want is a periodical article and you did not find the citation in a database, you may use the Journal and Newspaper Finder, as above, to find out if we have the article in either fulltext or print.

  You may also use the Citation Linker to search for the fulltext of a known article or for our holdings of a particular journal.

  Having so many options seems complicated. This flowchart shows a summary of the possibilities. The basic rule is:

  If there is a link in the record, use it, otherwise, use the HSU LIBRARY CATALOG or the JOURNAL AND NEWSPAPER FINDER depending on the type of publication you are looking for.

 

Send comments and suggestions about this page to: Martha Johansen
Last Updated: August 21, 2006