Getting Started With Discover

Basic search from the library home page

On the library home page, you can run a simple search in Discover using the "Search for library materials" box:

Advanced search from the Research menu

To go directly to Discover's Advanced search form, click on the library home page's Research menu and select "Discover advanced search":

The Discover advanced search screen offers multiple search boxes for combining search terms, options for searching by specific fields (title, author, subject, etc.), and options for setting a few filters before you search:

Reading the results page

The Discover results page displays a list of records for each of the items found.

At the top of the list you'll see 1 the total number of results and 2 options for sorting by Relevance (default), Date newest, or Date oldest. For each item in the list you'll see 3 the source type, 4 title, 5 a brief description, and 6 information for obtaining the electronic or print version of the item.

Clicking on the title of an item in the results list will take you into the full record, which often contains additional information about it that can help you determine if it's relevant to your research. For example, the full record for a journal article might contain an abstract (summary) of the article, or the full record for a book might contain the table of contents.

See the sections on Using print books, Using eBooks, and Accessing articles for more information about how to get the full readable versions of those kinds of materials.

Off campus access to Discover

When you open Discover from off campus, you'll notice a banner across the top of the page that reads "Welcome, Guest. You can see partial results here - but you must login for full access":

Click on it to log in using your Mount Holyoke username and password.