Category Archives: Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently asked question: Why should I use Catalyst?

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Question: What is the purpose of searching Catalyst when I could just as easily use a database or search engine that I know and love?

Answer:

A lot of students start their searches with a general topic but not much else (unlike professors and other experts, who might have a specific author or work in mind, or know what the disciplinary terms are). Catalyst is designed to let searchers cast their nets in a big sea where they are likely to encounter useful results right away, without necessarily needing to be expert searchers yet.

While Google Scholar is an excellent tool that most of us (librarians and faculty) use frequently, Catalyst searches a more selective group of resources based on the library’s collections. Catalyst also provides more options for refining searches. Catalyst blends the library’s physical holdings with an online universe of articles, so searchers can start their research in one place.

 

Frequently asked question: What is in Catalyst?

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Question: What materials and resources are in Catalyst?  What things are not included in Catalyst?

Answer:

Catalyst includes hundreds of millions of journal articles, dissertations, reference entries, maps, scores, conference proceedings, ebooks, online videos, and much more from hundreds of scholarly publishers and database vendors like ProQuest, Sage, PubMed, JSTOR, and many more.

Catalyst does not include detailed citations from EBSCO. Unless you specify otherwise, Catalyst searches things our library owns in some way, either on our shelves or through paid subscriptions, or that are freely available to be searched (like Hathitrust). If you already know you only want articles from a specific discipline, or you know detailed descriptions of the articles and books is really important to your search, you are better off searching a disciplinary database (Carleton databases | St. Olaf databases).

Frequently asked question: What is the difference between “Everything” and “Local Catalog”?

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Question:  What is the difference between the choices of “Everything” and “Local Catalog” when I start my search?

October 17, 2016 update: “Local Catalog” was renamed to “Carl/Ole Catalog” to clarify what was being searched.  This text of this post has been updated to reflect that, but the images have not.

[Screen shot of the Catalyst search box with "Everything" and "Local Catalog" outlined in red.]

[Screen shot of the Catalyst search box with “Everything” and “Local Catalog” outlined in red.]

Answer:

Generally, the “Carl/Ole Catalog” [formerly “local catalog”] searches for works (books, journals) that the Carleton or St. Olaf libraries own. Typically, these are things you’ll find on our library shelves. But to keep you on your toes, the local catalog search also includes some electronic stuff like ebooks and streaming videos.

Searching “Everything” expands your search to include not just stuff on our shelves, but also all the electronic articles and indexes that the library has via subscriptions (e.g. the articles in our JSTOR collection or the citations in our MLA subscription). It’s kind of like searching across almost all the databases the library has access to, all at once.

Finally, you have the option to check a box and search for articles from other libraries, too, but you have to choose this option after you have done your search.

ExpandMyResults

[Screen shot of the Catalyst results page with “Expand My Results. Include articles at other libraries” outlined in red.]

This lets you search not just our subscriptions but articles from lots of journals that we might not even own ourselves. This is obviously the most comprehensive search you can do, but also the way you are most likely to come across articles for which we might not have easy full-text access. It’s still a useful search, but you might need to use interlibrary loan to get the full text of what you find.

You can see an illustration of relationship between the different searches below.

[Illustration of a triangle demonstrating the types of searches you can do through Catalyst. The tip is "Course reserves" which brings back the fewest results. "Local Catalog" includes course reserves and items in our local collections. "Everything searches the local catalog and reserves, as well as articles and chapters from subscriptions. "Include articles from other libraries" includes everything noted above plus articles beyond our subscriptions, this brings back the most results (over 100 million potential results).]

Click to see larger version [Illustration of a triangle demonstrating the types of searches you can do through Catalyst. The tip is “Course reserves” which brings back the fewest results. “Local Catalog” includes course reserves and items in our local collections. “Everything searches the local catalog and reserves, as well as articles and chapters from subscriptions. “Include articles from other libraries” includes everything noted above plus articles beyond our subscriptions, this brings back the most results (over 100 million potential results).]