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How to Use an Online Library Catalog

Finding books at your local library is a helpful way to connect with the resources that you need for research or pleasure. Although sometimes it can be challenging to sort out which resources you need. Read on to learn how an online library catalog can help.

What is an Online Library Catalog?

An online library catalog is a database that contains information about the resources that your library offers. These resources might include books, DVDs, articles from an online database and other multimedia sources. The library catalog contains a section where you can interact with the cataloged data to find the books and resources you’re seeking.

Enter Your Search Criteria

When you first access your library’s online catalog, you’ll find a search window that allows you to add information. You can enter general phrases or specific book titles and author names to get the results you’re seeking. You may have an option for an advanced search that gives you a choice to narrow your search to certain media types or online articles. If you are working with a school or research library, you may also have the option to search an online catalog of articles that can enhance your body of research and provide even more results for you to browse.

Use the Online Library Catalog to Narrow Your Research

You can use an online library catalog to help you narrow your research category if you’re at the beginning of a research project. For example, if you search for “dogs” you might find results for books on dog behavior, puppy training and dog breeds. Unless you’re writing a comprehensive encyclopedia about dogs, you will want to narrow your field of research to one of these topics. The library catalog can give you inspiration for choosing a topic and finding the resources that you need for your project.

Find a Book’s Physical Location

In many ways, an online library catalog acts like a new and improved card catalog system. If you need to access physical books and materials, your online library catalog will direct you to the shelf location of those materials at your local library. You can even reserve or request materials from the catalog to ensure that the items you need are waiting for you when you get to the library.

Build a Bibliography

The information stored in an online library catalog includes bibliographic data that you can use to provide source information for paper or project. The catalog information is especially helpful if you’ve returned books you previously checked out and forgot to record the data then. Search the title you read, and you will find an entry that contains the information you’re after.

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Link to use Zoterobib

ZoteroBib   finds the item online (the article in JSTOR, the newspaper article, whatever), copy the URL and paste it into ZoteroBib's search bar. 

It also takes DOIs, ISBNs, PubMed IDs, and other identifiers. The service will return a formatted citation according to the style guide of your choice, and will allow you to build (and save, and share) a fully formatted bibliography. No account necessary, and no marketing or ads to clutter up your research space.

You can also experiment with Zotero  to collect, organize, cite and share your research.

How do I add parenthetical citations or notes to my paper?

As you write, ZoteroBib can help you quickly generate parenthetical citations (APA, MLA) or footnotes/endnotes (Chicago, Turabian) for the specific quotes, facts, or ideas you’re including into your paper. Just click the copy icon next to an entry in your bibliography, enter the relevant page range or section of the source that you’re citing, and click Copy Citation or Copy Note. You can then paste the citation into your paper.

For styles such as APA and MLA, if you incorporate an author’s name into a sentence (“As Smith writes…”), you can use the “Omit Author” option to include only a date and/or page number in the parenthetical citation (“(2015, pp. 12–13)”).

How do I add a completed bibliography to my paper?# If you’re using a word processor, you can simply click Copy to Clipboard and paste the formatted bibliography into your document.

With certain combinations of citation styles and word processors (e.g., LibreOffice), some of the formatting may become mangled when you export via the clipboard. In those cases, select Download RTF from the Export drop-down to download a formatted document that you can open in your word processor.

If you’re adding your bibliography to a webpage, you can use Copy HTML to copy HTML markup that you can embed in the page.

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Just need a few citations in APA, MLA, Chicago, or other commons formats?  Try these tools.

When working on extensive research projects, you will need to collect, organize and format all your citations. The following tools are supported by the Penn State Libraries and they allow you to search for and store your references, as well as create in-text citations and bibliographies.

Choosing between Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote

These popular citation managers all provide the same basic features and functionality with a few exceptions and some features specific to particular tools. Use the chart below to  narrow down your choices, the rest is personal preference.  Talk to people in your department – some disciplines tend to use one tool more than others.

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Citation generators.

With a citation generator, you enter your source bibliographic information in order to produce a citation in your selected citation style that you can copy and paste into your paper. Make sure to double-check that your generated citations are correct either with a style guide or at the  Purdue Online Writing Lab .

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Citation management systems allow you to download citations from various websites and databases (sometimes with the full-text article), electronically store and organize the citations, as well as insert citations and a bibliography into your paper in the format of your choice as you write your paper. If you need to manage a large number of citations or are going to need to write a lot of papers that require you to cite sources, a citation management system may make citing sources in your paper a whole lot easier. If you work collaboratively on some projects, your citations can also be shared with groups or co-authors.

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