The Online Catalog includes records of print, electronic books and media materials owned by the Library. To begin searching the Online Catalog, click on the button located on the homepage.

For more specific searches, try the Power Search option to combine search elements, limit a search by format or location, or browse books by topic or call number.

1. Use the drop-down menu to select the type of search you are requesting.
2. Enter your search terms in the search box.
3. Use Boolean operators to connect words or phrases between more than one text field, or use Boolean operators to connect words or phrases within a text field. Select a Boolean operator AND, OR, NOT, XOR.
4. For more search terms, select the type of search you are requesting and type your terms in the following search boxes.

Here are some examples:

To narrow your search results, use the AND operator (default) to locate records containing all of the specified search terms.

To expand your search results, use the drop-down menu to select the OR operator, which will retrieve records matching any or all of the specified terms. The XOR operator will retrieve records matching either any one of the specified terms but not all of the specified terms.

To exclude search term(s) from your results, use the drop-down menu to select the NOT operator to locate records containing the first search term but not the second.

From the PowerSearch page, click on "Browse" to the right of the screen to view a list of books by author, title, or subject.

In the example below for "Capital Punishment," select "Subject" to browse.

Use the drop-down menu to select LATTC Library; default is set to browse all LACCD Libraries.

More searching tips:

Substitution

The ? symbol is used as a substitute for a missing character in a search term, usually when you are unsure of a spelling or when you want to find two forms of one word. For example, if you enter WOM?N, the e-library locates records containing either "woman" or "women."

Truncation

The $ symbol is used to truncate search terms and can represent a single characters, many characters, or no characters. If you follow the $ symbol with a number, the e-library limits the number of characters matched. When more than one term in a search expression is truncated, each term is searched for all variations. For example, if you enter JAME$, the e-library locates the specified records containing the terms "Jame," "James," "Jamison," and "Jamestown."

Stopwords

Specified words are ignored in the catalog. These stopwords are usually articles, prepositions, or conjunctions, such as a, an, as, at, be, but, by, do, for, if, in, it, of, on, the, and to, among others.

For additional information, click on the HELP button on the navigation bar of the Online Catalog.