Graduate Student Toolkit: Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

Catalog Quick Search

Find books, journals, DVDs, collections and more in our catalogs. | HELP

For journal or newspaper titles, use the Journal Catalog.
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Interlibrary Loan (ILL) makes resources available by providing electronic or physical delivery of material from other library collections. Material that is not owned by Stony Brook University Libraries may be obtained from other participating libraries.

For more information, please visit our website.

 When you find a book that looks good, scroll down to the bottom of the screen, and you’ll see the Library of Congress subject headings.  You can click on these links to find more books on that subject.  You can also use these subject headings when searching databases, WorldCat, and many digital collections on the internet.

Learn some basic Library of Congress Subject Headings for your topic.

Look for Bibliographies & Indexes in Subject Headings. These can be useful resources.

Library of Congress subject headings often used for primary sources:

• Sources
• Correspondence
• Diaries
• Interviews
• Personal narratives
• Biography (includes memoirs)

Google Books is extremely useful, because it searches the complete text of a book. It can help you find books that may not come up in the library catalog. When you find a book that looks good, then do a "Title starts with" search in SEARCH to see if the Library has it.

As of 2019, Google Books contained over 40 million scanned books. Many from before 1925 are available full-text.

WorldCat is a catalog of most libraries in the U.S. & Canada and many from other countries. Find books, DVDs, web sites, musical scores, archival material and more.

There are two versions of WorldCat, the subscription version from First Search, which is below and which I recommend, and the free version.  If you find something you need while searching in WorldCat, and we don't own it, we can usually get it from another library. See InterLibrary Loan (ILL) to learn more. One great feature of the First Search version is that it automatically fills out your ILL request form.