If you come across a book that you need for your research, and UIW Libraries does not own it, you may request it through our Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service. The transaction is between UIW Libraries and the lending library on your behalf and costs you nothing.
Although we process your requests upon receipt, interlibrary loan for books can take anywhere from two weeks up to as long as a semester to arrive. Books might take so long because once we process your request, it is out of our hands. The lending library has to check their shelves, and if they have the book, they have to package and ship it to us. If they do not have the book, it will be referred to the next closest library that has the book listed in their catalog for processing.
Advanced searching using NestSearch (our discovery tool) allows you to refine your search by date, author, full-text, and a variety of other ways, and suggests related search strategies. You will notice that the NestSearch search box has tabs titled Everything, Books & More, Articles & More, and Databases & Journals.
Everything throws a large net (with large holes in it). It will retrieve books, articles, ebooks, streaming video and DVDs about your topic but nothing really retrieves everything. Additionally, it may retrieve things you simply do not need. For example, if you use the Everything tab to search "human resources," it will find citations from over one million peer-reviewed journals. Aside from being unworkable, how do you know if they address your topic. Maybe you are only interested in human resources in business, but searching "human resources" in Everything is going to pull information from education (human resources in schools), from medical and nursing (human resources in hospitals, for example), and every other configuration.
A better way to search is to think about your topic and what you hope to find. Choose the Books & More tab to find streaming video, ebooks, and hard materials we will have in our collection like DVDs, music scores, and, of course, books (including both books in our reference collection, which do not circulate, and books that you may check out. Graduate students may check out as many as 100 books at a time and may keep them for four weeks.)
Articles & More works much like Everything, but it will limit the results to articles, review, dissertations (no books, ebooks, streaming video, etc.)
The best way to search for articles is by subject. Choose the Databases & Journals tab and then Databases by Subject.
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Most of the materials in our library are organized by the Library of Congress LC) subject classification system so that materials on similar subjects are shelved together. Each item is given a subject heading that corresponds to a call number which identifies the location of the item on a shelf. The main classes are: