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.

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.

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.