Geography Research Guide: Finding Books & Gov Docs

The MSU Libraries have several million books (including e-books) and government documents from local, state, federal and international governments. To find a publication, begin at the library home page and search for a title or subject.  Such as:  climatic changes and great lakes

In the "Books & Media" section of the results, click "See More" to create a more focused search.

Use the limiters in the left column to focus the search results.  You may also type new additional words into the search box at the top of the page.

Looking at an individual record of the book will tell us if it is an Ebook or location information if it is a physical paper book

The image above shows a catalog record for a book owned by MSU Libraries.  By looking at this record, we can see:  

• MSU Libraries owns a copy of the book
• The location is in the Main Library
• Both copies have a call number E185.625 .A385 2009. Books with this call number are normally located in the basement.
• The book is currently checked out (at the time we took this screen grab), however you could request another copy be mailed to you using Interlibrary Loan (at no extra charge to you).

The name of a publisher appears in every book's catalog record.  The publisher name can be searched through the "Keyword" catalog search.  Therefore you may find books published by a university press by keyword searching your topic with the phrase 'university press'.

Example: watersheds and university press

This search will retrieve a rough approximation.  It may fail to retrieve books hen the university press doesn't have those words in its name, or may retrieve books that happen to have those words elsewhere in the catalog record other than publisher.