Locating books and other materials in the Alkek Library
- Call Numbers will guide you to the location of physical items within the library.
- If you are having problems with finding a particular book, you can ask a librarian for help.
- This guide may also help you: Locating Books by Call Number
Criminal Justice & Sociology Call Numbers
If you like to browse the bookshelves, some general call numbers to help you locate books by broad topics are:
Introduction
Use the Library Catalog to search for print resources, multimedia resources, and ebooks. The Library Catalog also provides location and availability details. Use quotation marks for "phrase searching"
Books are a great source for background information, big themes, and analysis of a large topic. They are not such a great option for up-to-date statistics or cutting edge research because of the amount of time they take to publish.
If you find a book that looks like it might be useful, look at the table of contents and index and try to find the topic keywords you identified. If you can't find your keywords, the book is probably not going to be helpful for your research. If the keywords are in certain chapters, you can identify which sections you'll need to read instead of wasting your time on the whole book.
Tips for Finding Books
Types of Searches
Keyword
- Combine terms using AND.
- This search returns records that contain words that match exactly what you typed in.
- This is often (but not always) the best place to start.
Subject
- Catalog uses pre-defined subjects.
- This type of search works well if you are browsing for a particular subject that you know or a broad term. So if you aren't finding anything, switch to the keyword search instead.
- Subjects are arranged using the Library of Congress Classification system.
Author
- Author searches are for looking for items a particular person has authored or written.
- The library catalog works best if you type in searches in the format "Lastname, Firstname."
- If you want books about a person, search for their name by subject.
Title
- Use this search if you know the title of the material that you want.
Reference Resources and Ebooks
Reference material can be very useful for finding broad overviews on a topic:
A collection of online reference material that covers sociology, social work, multicultural and gender studies, political science, psychology, anthropology, criminal justice, health & medicine. Main page allows for searching across all titles and subjects in the collection.