Introduction to Library Search

Remote video URL


Welcome to this video introducing you to library search.

So what is Library Search? Well, it's a tool for searching and accessing all our resources both print and electronic. So that includes books, journals, images and multimedia, plus some additional content such as our research repository and open access content which is freely available.

So how do you access Library Search? Well, you can find it on the library website homepage at library.fxplus.ac.uk. But you can also Google the library website or access it by the Falmouth App if you're a Falmouth student.

So now let's try and do a search. So to do a search, you simply enter your keywords into the search box. Let's try a search for war photography. So here are the results.

But before we take a look just to say that if you sign in here at the top, you'll have full access to all resources and to full functionality, so you'll be able to do things like saving favourites, setting up search alerts, as well as accessing your library account too. But you can search without signing in.

So once you've done your search, what do you do if you get too many results or you're not finding what you need? Remember, you can use these filters over on the left hand side. So for example, I'm going to search for articles so I select the resource type here, articles and tick the little box to the left hand side. But I could also select peer reviewed journals if we want to find really good quality articles, but you can also exclude auctions to the right hand side of the filters. So you see that little red box so I'm going to put across in the open access. So that means I've excluded open access content, freely available content rather than journals that we subscribe to. So when I apply the filters we should see the number of results goes down. So we've gone from 85,000 to 23,000. But you can apply various other filters here on the left hand side to help you hone down on what you need to find.

So if I want to access one of these articles, and take a look at it, you can just click on the article which will bring up a new window and it will show you where it's available online. So this is available via several different databases. But I'm just going to go in by this one and you can see now that I can access full text of this in PDF. And then I could also select HTML full text if I preferred, but here you can download or print the article if you want to.


And then if you want to get back to your search, you can just click on this cross and then you can see your active filters are displayed. So you can reset these filters if you want to. So if you now wanted to do a quick search for books, you could do that. And you could select whether you wanted online or available in the library and then you will get the location for the book here if it's on campus and it tells you exactly where to find it or you'll be able to access it as an ebook.

But if you've exhausted your options for that search, and you want to start a completely new one with different keywords, you can just select the new search option number here at the top. But if you want some further help, you can see that we put a video playlist here on the homepage and some FAQs.

But if you get stuck then just get in touch with us and we can help you all our contact details are on the website and you can also access the library chat service there to ask us anything about library search or other things too.