Get to know the Library's search engine

Choose any of these options from the search engine's drop-down menu:

The search box

 

• All: all the contents available in the UOC Library, the O2 Repository and the recommended reading of the courses. 
• Recommended reading: just the resources recommended by the University's teaching staff for further information on the courses.
• Learning resources: search among the materials prepared by the UOC and used in the classrooms. 
• The O2 repository: consult contents prepared by the UOC community and available with open access. This may be, for example, final projects or scientific articles.
• Catalan University Union Catalogue: broaden your search with the contents available in other Catalan university libraries. You can request books on loan or digital articles.

Using the button Extend the search beyond the UOC you will be shown books from other institutions which you can request on inter-library loan and digital articles which you can request from the Library.

The filters will help you hone your searches. The main filters are:

• Availability: choose the type of document which interests you according to the format (online or physical copy), whether it is open access or the quality (whether it is peer-reviewed).
• Type of resource: choose the type of documents, books, articles, theses or videos.
• Journal title: thanks to this filter you will see the articles from the publications which have the term searched for in the title.
• UOC collection: Special series of content grouped by the UOC.
• Subject: get results for a specific discipline. 

To further finetune the results, you can select other filters such as the date or language.

Tutorial - How to conduct advanced searches (Spanish)

A step-by-step example of how to use the advanced search tool.

You'll find the Advanced Search button integrated in the Library search engine. Log in with your UOC Campus credentials to benefit from all that the search engine offers.

Just fill in the different fields:

The operators AND, OR and NOT (they must be written in capital letters) help you refine your results in the Library resources search engine. You can use these operators to combine the search terms and establish relationships between them.

In the Library search box, Boolean operators are used in English and in upper case.

How can I use them?

How can I refine my results even more? Combine the Boolean operators as often as you want to create personalized search formulas.

As in mathematics, you can use brackets to define the order in which the terms must be interpreted: the search engine reads first the words in brackets. For example, if you write your search as (children OR adolescents) AND learning, the search engine will first interpret that you only want information about children or adolescents and will then relate these results with learning.

Furthermore, if you want to search for results that contain a specific phrase, you can use inverted commas. For example: If you write "Olympic games", you will get results with the words "Olympic Games" in that order and together.

Try these tricks in the Library search tool. You can also use them in most academic information search tools:

• The asterisk (*) is a wildcard. If you use it next to the root of a word, you will recover results that include all its variations.

Entering cultur* will retrieve content with the terms culture, cultural and culturally.

If you enter subject: librar*, you will recover all the documents that contain library, libraries or librarians as subjects.

• If you add * or a question mark (?), you will replace a single letter of the word.

Entering wom?n will retrieve content for women in plural and woman in singular. 

• The operators AND, NO and OR allow you to combine search terms.

If you search for college OR university, you will retrieve information that contains one or both terms. 

• Adding quotation marks (" ") at the beginning and end of a phrase or group of words retrieves results for exactly those words.

If you search for "borderline personality disorder", you will see only documents that contain this exact phrase.

If you enter “history teaching” in the search box, you will obtain results such as Teaching History.

In your personal account, consult information on your loan reservations and cancel or renew the books you have requested. You can also consult other requests, such as your Consortium Loan (PUC) requests, and edit your personal details.

When you find an interesting book or article on the search engine's list of results, click on the pin icon to save it in your favourites and read it later.  

You can see the titles saved in My favourites. You can also save your searches and consult your reading history if you want to recover a document that you found in the past.