The Library Company’s catalog encompasses our vast collection of books, manuscripts, prints, photographs, and other materials. Anyone can access the catalog to explore the library’s holdings, discover specific items, and plan their research more effectively. Although the catalog serves as an organized and searchable inventory of most items held by the library, it’s important to note that it may not be all inclusive, particularly for graphic arts materials.

• Search Hints:
  • Take advantage of advanced search features.
    • Use the first column of drop down options to apply Boolean operators and, or and not in your search. For example, you could search [proprietary] or [popular] and [medicine] to retrieve all records having proprietary or popular in them, together with the word medicine.
    • Use the second column of drop down options to search by keyword, subject, title, call number, author, publisher, publisher location, and more.
    • Towards the bottom of the advanced search page, you can find options to limit your search by item type, publication date, and language. You may also choose to sort results by relevance, or ordered by author, call number, date, or title
      
  • See this guide to access terms used in the Library Company’s catalog records.
  • Lowercase letters will find matches of capitalized words also. For example, abolition will find matches for abolition, Abolition and ABOLITION.
  • Use the * or % character to find matches that contain portions of words. For example, slave* will retrieve slave, slaves, slavery, slaveholders, etc. In another example, *manship will retrieve penmanship, horsemanship, workmanship, etc. The % character may  be used to find variant spellings. For example, Smi% will find Smith, Smothers, Smelley, etc.