Union Catalogue
Help
You can either browse collections to find out about the scope of Linnaean material held at institutions near you, or search the Union catalogue to find out which institutions hold a particular bibliographic item.
To search the catalogue, proceed as follows:
- 1. Choose one of the search modes (default, Advanced or Soulsby).
- 2. Enter a search term and click "search".
- 3. From the results page, you can see which institution(s) hold each item.
- 4. If you wish to find further information about the item held at a particular institution, click the institution link alongside the record.
You will either be taken to the exact record which will provide local information about the item (e.g whether or not it can be borrowed), or to the homepage of the online library catalogue of the institution where you will need to re-key the search to find the exact record.
Records are linked in the union catalogue on the basis of there being a Soulsby number present. Where records from several institutions share the same Soulsby number, there will be one bibliographic record which links to more than one institutional holdings record. Please note that the display of the holdings is within the local catalogue used by the institution and the way in which these are formatted will differ between institutions.
The system supports boolean searching. You can use the keywords AND, OR, NOT from the default search, or link search terms using the dropdown menus available in the Advanced search screen. You can use right-hand truncation searching by using the asterisk (*) character. You can perform phrase searching by using quotation marks.
The Soulsby number search looks for the exact number entered. Enter just the number itself and not the phrase "Soulsby number". If you check the "Allow suffixes" box, the system will conduct a right-hand truncation search on Soulsby number. For example, 34 would find all instances of Soulsby numbers starting with 34, including related references.
From a brief results screen, click the page number, previous or next buttons which appear at the bottom of the screen to move from one screen to another. From the full results screen, if there are related Soulsby numbers (e.g. see also, bound with etc.), these are displayed and hyperlinked in the record. By clicking on the hyperlink, a Soulsby number search will be conducted on the Soulsby number and retrieve any related record(s).