52 Book Challenge - Week 11

Last week, we gave you some advice for how to search our catalogue or One Search for finding books set in your local area (which is harder than it sounds if you live outside of the major cities).

We did this because the challenge for this week is:

11. A book set in your hometown/region

Now, just to shake things up, this week we'll tell you how to search someone else's catalogue for our books:  The National Library of Australia's.

Trove is a catalogue that covers most libraries in the country - including ours - and you can try searching Trove to see what we have.

Why would you use someone else's catalogue to search our collection? Because different tools are designed to have different strengths, and because they focus on different things.

In Trove, head over to the Advanced Search option. If your home town isn't Townsville or Cairns, type in the name of your town or region (e.g. Innisfail) where it says "Keyword", then scroll down the page to find the part where it asks you what library you want to search. Type in James Cook University, and hit Find Locations, then tick our name.

On the next page, click the link to narrow to books.

Now, this isn't as useful if your home town is Townsville or Cairns (although it will work to an extent) because most of our books have the words "Townsville" or "Cairns" in the record (for the location of the book). In this case, change the search from "Keywords" to "Subject".

You can also narrow it down further by adding more "Subjects" like "history" or "biography" or "fiction".

Try it, and see what you can find.


Have you missed out on hearing about the 52 Book Challenge? Catch up here