Welcome to using the CARD CATALOG

The days of the cabinet drawers full of index cards are over! Thanks to modern technology, all bibliographic information is stored electronically in data bases, CD -ROMS, and even cyberspace. What is even more exciting is that now the card catalog works like a search engine, such as yahoo or google, and is just about as easy to use. Lessons on how to search the card catalog start as early as the third grade.It has becomeso easy to use that most public libraries allow access to their catalogs via the internet for people to use at home, at school, or even at work.That means no librarian's guidance is necessary; anyone can do it!

There are three basic ways librarians search for information in the card catalog:

TITLE, AUTHOR, SUBJECT.

What this basically means is no matter what software a library uses you can type in the title, the author, or the subject of the material you are looking for and the catalog will tell you if the library owns it, if it checked out, and where it is located in the library. It is that simple. There is one rule that all users of the card catalog must adhere to and that is spelling counts. The computer looks for the letters that you enter in your search. If that combination of letters is not in the database, the computer will tell you that there is no such item in the library. Computers don't think for us, but they are great tools if you tell them the right things to do.