Books and How to Locate Them
Books can be used as primary or secondary sources, according to their publication date and the topic of your research.
Catalogs are used to find books and other materials (available in your library and in other institutions.)
OSCAR is the online catalog for Santa Clara University. It includes all the books in our collection as well as other materials such as videos, DVDs, periodicals, and government documents. Some books are located in the Main Stacks on the Lower Level of the library. Other books are in the Automated Retrieval System (ARS). Use OSCAR to request books from the ARS.
Melvyl is the catalog for all the libraries of the University of California system.
WorldCat includes books and other materials from academic, public, special, and national libraries around the world.
Online Books
Santa Clara University's library now purchases many books in electronic format. The advantage of e-books, of course, is that the full-text of the book is usually searchable.
ACLS History E-Book Project, for example, is a collection of 474 books in the field of history. Each electronic title is accessible through the OSCAR catalog. To get a list of the titles available, you can do a title search in OSCAR for History E-Book Project.
The full-text of many public domain (pre-1925) books can also be found at:
Project Gutenberg Free eBook Library
Interlibrary Loan
If you search OSCAR and find out that Santa Clara doesn't own a book you are interested in, you can use:
LINK+, a service which allows students and faculty to borrow materials from member libraries at several other colleges and public libraries, provided that those materials are not available at the SCU libraries. Books borrowed through LINK+ should be available within 3 days.