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FYWB 1128 - Music in Narrative

Research Guide for Prof. Weybright's First Year Writing Class

CLIO Catalog Searching

CLIO Catalog

CLIO is the online catalog to Columbia University Libraries (including Barnard), but excluding Teacher's College and the Law Library who maintain their own catalogs. CLIO contains over 7 million records for books, online resources, journals & newspapers, conference proceedings, sound recordings & scores, videos, archival collections & oral history transcripts, online databases, maps & images, and more!

CLIO Search Tips:
  • Use the Catalog Search to find books, journal and newspaper titles, media materials, musical scores, archival collections and databases (but not articles within databases). You can also find maps and atlases.
  • Article Search allows you to search articles indexed in all of Columbia's databases
  • Search for specific e-journal titles using the E-journal Title search
  • Use the link to Borrow Direct or Interlibrary Loan when the book or media item is checked out.

CLIO Quicksearch

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CLIO is the library catalog for the Columbia Library System (including Barnard Library, but excluding Teachers College and some information from the Law Library). In CLIO you can find books and media materials, search for different kinds of databases, and find articles within those databases as well.

What is CLIO? from IMATS @ Barnard on Vimeo.

Finding Books and Media

Tips for entering searches:

  • When entering search terms, use the * symbol to search for variant spellings and endings. The asterisk stands in for one or more letters. For instance, theat* searches theatre, theater, theatrical, etc. 
  • If you're searching terms together as a phrase, surround them with quotes. For instance, "performance art."
  • Use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to search terms together. Find more on Boolean logic here.

Tips for exploring results:

  • Use the facet boxes on the left hand side of the results page. These will help you narrow down results by format, publication date, author/creator name, location, language, subject heading, and more. 
  • When exploring an individual record for an item, like a book or film, reaqd the table of contents and summary (if available) to help you determine the relevance of a source to your research goals. 
  • Use linked subject headings in item records to try out new searches. 

  • Text or email the call number to yourself. 

Beyond Barnard and Columbia

  • Borrow Direct or Interlibrary Loan are great options for requesting a book that isn't currently available at the Columbia libraries. 
  • Worldcat searches libraries worldwide. Using Worldcat, you can quickly find out if an item might be available at the NYPL, or another academic library (if the latter, try Borrow Direct or ILL to request from off campus).
  • The NYPL catalog searches the circulating and non-circulating research collections at the New York Public Library. The Archives and Manuscripts search page allows for exploration of special collections.

Ebooks

You'll find ebooks among the results in just about every database you search, whether they are general academic databases or subject area specific ones. If you are interested in searching only for ebooks, you can limit your library catalog search to return only ebooks as your results, and you can do the same in any database. Sometimes you will find that chapters within ebooks turn up in your searches. Make sure to read through your results thoroughly to make sure you're aware of exactly what you're exploring.