Borrow It Now: Search Tips

If you've read all of our search tips (to the right) and you're still stuck, please contact us and we'll help you out.  Our contact info is below.

Phone: (808) 956-8568

Email: libill@hawaii.edu

Office: Hamilton Library, room 101 (the patron entrance is near the Microfilms room)

1. If you know exactly which item you want, use the advanced search and enter the title and author.

2. If you don't have a specific item in mind, use the simple search and enter a subject or keyword.  You can see what's available and begin to narrow your search based on these results.

3. Please be patient when searching.  The results load much slower than a typical webpage.  This is because BorrowItNow uses the Z39.50 protocol to retrieve holdings information from 31 university library catalogs.

4. E-books and journals/journal articles are not requestable via BorrowItNow.  To request a journal or journal article, please continue to use our regular ILL request page

5. If you have a great research book and you want to find similar books, search for the title of the book.  Open the record, and look at the subjects used to catalog the book.  Try searching for any of these subjects to find similar works.

6. You can use quotes to search for a specific phrase.  This is especially helpful if your phrase uses the words "and" or "or" which are used as Boolean operators.  For example, you can search "crime and punishment" (including the quotes) to find the novel by Dostoyevsky.  Searching crime and punishment (without quotes) may bring up books about the legal system.

7. You can use parentheses for complicated searches.  For example, you can search ti=Huckleberry Finn and (au=Clemens or au=Twain).  Samuel Clemens wrote under the pseudonym Mark Twain, so some versions of the same novel appear to be written by Clemens while others are by Twain.

Please see this page for more helpful tips.