SISSE 343/POLS 343 - Spring 2013: Find Books

Tips for Using the UW Catalog

Try a keyword search first and look at the assigned Subject Headings to refine your search.  Note that you can limit any search by language, if you are looking for foreign language materials.

Useful Subject Headings:

• Southeast Asia -- Biography
• Oral biography
• Oral history [subdivide by country]
• Southeast Asia -- Politics and government
• [Country name] -- Politics and government
• Heads of state -- Southeast Asia
• Political leadership -- Southeast Asia
• Political refugees --[Country]
  
• [Country name]-- Political prisoners -- Biography
• [Country name] --Politicians --Biography
• [Country name] -- Political refugees

Useful Sub-headings

• Biography
• Sources
• History
• Personal narratives

 Plurals, truncation, and wildcards (UW WorldCat)

Use + for plurals (s and es)
Use * for truncation
Use # for a wildcard character
Use ?N for up to N characters

You can also search by the the names of peoples and languages, "Indonesian" for instance, or you can use "Indonesia" with the truncation symbol "Indonesia*" to find all instances of both "Indonesia" and "Indonesian."

Non Roman Script Materials

The UW Catalog does not represent non-roman scripts, such as Thai or Burmese, although some records using Thai script can now be found on WorldCat.  These languages are transliterated into roman alphabet in the UW Catalog, using the Library of Congress Transliteration Tables.  You need to become familiar with this table in order to search the catalog in Thai, Burmese or Khmer.  Note that you do not have to input the diacritic marks to search in the catalog. See General Information on Diacritics and Special Characters.

Tips for Searching the UW Catalog for Books:

• Try a keyword search either using English or the language you are looking for.
• Notice the subject headings on the useful books that you retrieve and click on those subject headings to find more useful books.
• Use the Advanced Search to limit your search to words in the title or subject, to limit by language, or by date of publication.
• Getting too few results? Try searching UW WorldCat for items available through the Summit consortium.

UW WorldCat: Search UW Libraries and beyond Search books Search video Search audio Search articles Search all Books Video Audio Articles All Advanced search | Help Advanced search | Help Advanced search | Help Advanced search | Help Advanced search | Help

UW Worldcat can be useful when you want to search as broadly as possible for a topic or when you are seeking a rare item not available at the UW. It facilitates borrowing books from other libraries.  However, for complete coverage of SEA titles at UW use the UW-only Catalog.

Tips for searching UW WorldCat for Books on Southeast Asia:

• Try a keyword search
• Use the Topic limit (one of the links along the left of your search results) to narrow the scope of your search to. For instance, if you search on Vietnam War, you can limit your topic to Performing Arts.