Getting Started With Discover

What is Discover?

Discover is a search tool that draws results from many different places at the same time, including the Five College Catalog and many of the library's subscription databases.* It's a good place to begin many research projects.

You can use it to find:

• Books and eBooks
• Articles from journals, magazines, and newspapers
• Online encyclopedias and dictionaries

What is the Five College Catalog?

Mount Holyoke College is part of the Five College Consortium, which also includes Amherst College, Hampshire College, Smith College, and UMass Amherst.

One of the many benefits of this consortium is that we share our collections, which means that Mount Holyoke students have access to many of the books and other physical items owned by the other Five College libraries.

When you search in Discover, your results will include books from from all of these libraries because it is the Five College Libraries' shared catalog. (In this case, "catalog"  means "a search tool for materials the library owns.")

You can request for many of these books to be delivered to you here at Mount Holyoke (at no charge to you!) within one or two weekdays. See Requesting a book to learn more.

How to use Discover to search just the Five College Catalog

If you want to find books (or other resources) in our library collections, it's helpful to know how to exclude search results that aren't from the Five College Catalog. (Note: this will exclude articles from your search results!).

Here are a couple of ways to do this.

Option 1: Set your preferences before running a search

Before doing your search, you can pre-limit your search results to Five College Library Catalog materials using the following steps:

1. Go to the Discover Advanced search form by:
   • visiting the Library, Information, and Technology Services homepage,
   • clicking on the Research menu,
   • and selecting "Discover advanced search." 
2. In the search form's "Limit your results" section, find and select the "Five Colleges Library Catalog Only" option before running your search:

Option 2: Limit your results after doing a search

After you've done a search, you can limit your results to Five College Library Catalog materials by: 

1. Clicking All Filters beneath the search box: 
2. Then, in the All filters menu, select the Five Colleges LIbrary Catalog Only and click the Apply:

What's not included?

The main things you won't find in Discover are:

1. Databases Excluded by Discover

Some of our databases will need to be searched directly because Discover does not include their resources in its results.

These include:

• ProQuest databases
• Many image and video databases 
• Various smaller databases, often tied to specific subject areas

2. Some archival resources

Not all archival materials are searchable with Discover.

See ASC Research for info about searching our archival and primary resource collections.