WMU’s Search and Discovery system (our "Online Catalog") is called Library Search.

You can use Library Search to:

• Search for books, videos, music, and articles.
• Limit search results to peer-reviewed publications only.
• Browse books on the shelf using the “Virtual browse” feature.
• Set up “alerts” for search terms, authors, publishers, etc. This will automatically send you e-mail notification once something new goes into the database that matches your criteria.
• Save and export search results.

What am I searching?

When you search Library Search, you are searching most of the books, journals, journal articles and other scholarly materials that we have either in our physical collections OR that we own or subscribe to electronically. You can search materials that we don't own or subscribe to using the "Expand Beyond My Library" box in the Library Search results. So Library Search does NOT search EVERYTHING. However, it does search a large interdisciplinary selection of materials, similarly to Google Scholar, as shown in the diagram below. It was designed to meet the needs of undergraduate users who have not yet been exposed to discipline-specific databases (PsycINFO, PubMed) and interdisciplinary researchers whose research does not fall into neat, tidy disciplinary categories.

* Some materials are not discoverable through Library Search. For an idea of what is NOT covered, please see the "Library Search Collections" page above.

Various elements of this guide were inspired by or adapted from a guide by Stephanie Mathson at Central Michigan University Library - http://libguides.cmich.edu/smartsearch/. Used with her permission.