HST 112: Finding Books
Why Use Books?
You do not need to read an entire book cover to cover in order to use it as a source in your research assignment.
Look at the table of contents to see if there is a chapter that addresses your narrower aspect of a broader topic covered in a book. For example: Is there a chapter about Ohio's response to the opioid epidemic in a book about the broader national response?
Or you can use the book's index to see which specific pages a book contain information about your topic and read only those pages. (For example: Perhaps a book about the opioid epidemic includes information about Ohio drug courts on pages 72-75).
Find Books and Ebooks
Miami University Online Catalog
Search By: Keyword
Limit By: General Topic and Where The Item is Located
Look For: Call Number, Location, and Availability
Request Item from other MU Libraries
Click on the title of an item to find out more information about that item and to get the citation for that item. To find the citation, click on the icon that looks like a yellow piece of paper and says "Cite" when you hover over it. In the box that opens, scroll to find the citation in the style you need, and you can highlight, copy, and paste that into your references page. Always be sure to double-check your copied citations, though. Often, formatting such as italics and hanging indents, are not pasted over correctly. You will need to do some manual reformatting to ensure that you receive full credit for this portion of your assignment.
Change Date Range: by sliding the rule under "Publication Date" or by typing in specific years in the boxes. (red box in screenshot) Your results list will then only include items that were published within your specified date range.
Get Only Ebooks: In the left-hand column, click on the arrow next to "Material Type" and then check the box next to "Electronic Resources". (red arrow in screenshot)
Continue Searching in OhioLINK for unavailable titles. OhioLINK allows you to request books from college and university libraries all over the state of Ohio.
Tip: To find books about a person enter their name in the search box like this: "Lastname, Firstname". Then, on the dropdown menu, change from keyword searching to "subject heading." This will give you a list of biographies and autobiographies of the person.
You can also search for books by their title if you know it. Enter the book title in the text box. Then, simply change the dropdown menu below from "keyword" to "title" before you click the search button.
eBooks
Where can I find e-books? Along with other books at the MU libraries in our online catalog. E-books are distinguished from print with the label "electronic resource" in brackets after the title.
Ex: Contagion and chaos [electronic resource] : disease, ecology and national security...
How do I read an e-book? After the title and info about the book, click the blue "Connect to electronic book" link. If you are off-campus, enter your Miami Unique ID and Password first.
Can I download or print an e-book? Sometimes. Each publisher has different rules for how students can use their e-books. If you are permitted to print or download (often limited to a specified number of chapters or pages) it will be noted when you open the e-book.
Remember...
Books contain a lot of text and other information, but our catalogs search the words in titles, table of contents (sometimes), and subject headings. Keep this in mind when searching for books and consider searching for broader terms rather than very precise topics.