With Library Search you find information resources such as books, ebooks, journal articles, music scores, and much more. Through Library Search, you access electronic resources the BCU Library has subscribed for your course. You can use Library Search on a computer or a smartphone.
In this section you learn how to use Library Search:
- Submit a simple search query using the search box and selecting search options.
- Skim search results to check an item's availability, identify relevant items and discover related resources.
- Save your search.
Video - Using the search box
Watch this video to discover all the library search box features.
Mind your search prompt!
Library Search works with keywords: it does not interpret natural language like a web search engine or an AI bot would.
The quality of your search results therefore depends on how you prompt the search engine.
Learn search techniques such as breaking down the topic, phrase searching, wildcards or logical operators in the Searching guide and in the Library's Moodle course: 'Navigating the library'.
Searching Skills & TechniquesNavigating the library (Moodle)
Sign-in after searching
Remember to sign-in with your BCU email address and password to benefit from all the Library Search features and services.
Full-text access links to resources and features such as saving search queries require you sign-in with your BCU account.
1- Type terms separated by spaces in the search box and press return or click the search button.
You can find a Library Search box on most pages of the Library website.
2- Remember to sign-in to get complete results, request items or access online content.
Selecting a search option
When you know the type of resource you are looking for, select a search options that appears after you start typing in the search box or in the menu next to the search button:
- Everything: All available entries.
- Physical resources: The stock within the library buildings such as books, newspapers, music scores, DVDs, etc...
- Online resources: eBooks, journals, articles and other electronic resources from the publishers' and aggregators' online databases.
- Articles: Publications from online journals only.
- BCU Digital Library: Digitised books and documents including dissertations, old exam papers and useful reading for your course.
Setting a search option restricts the scope of the results and you might miss valuable resources.
How does Library Search work?
- Library Search matches terms in your query to the titles, authors, summaries and metadata related to the resources in its index.
- Search terms are not case-sensitive.
- The Library Search assumes you are looking for all the terms separated by spaces unless you use the operators OR or NOT.
- If a comma is used to separate words in a list, the comma must be followed by a space. Otherwise, the system will consider the comma to be part of the word and return fewer results than expected.
- The search engine uses search enhancements (such as inflection of a phrase based on correlation statistics) to find terms or phrases matching the keywords in your query.
- A query composed of terms separated by spaces is treated as a sentence and returns results in which all of the terms may be close together but not in the exact order.