Registration
You can search both sections of Catalog plus without a login. Once you are logged in you can save titles and hit lists and print or email them.
Log in to Catalog plus (top righthand corner) using your university login if you are a member of the university (student, employee) or your library card ID if you are an external member of the library.
If you are accessing the Catalog plus from within the university network (including the PCs in the library) many of the electronic documents and articles which you will find in the section "Articles & more" will be available in the fulltext version.
Fulltext access is also available outwith the university network for members of the university using a VPN client.
External library users must use Internet PCs within the library buildings to gain access to the fulltext version.
If you would like to order a book from the stacks via the section "Books & more" you will have to login seperately during the ordering process as the login from Catalog plus will not be transfered to this system.
Parallel search
No matter in which section you enter your search terms, a parallel search will be performed in both "Books & more" and "Articles & more".
The tabs show the number of hits in each section and you can switch between them as you like.
Filtering options ("narrow search") will not be transfered from one section to the other, as the two indexes differ too much.
Search methods
You can choose one of two search methods for the two sections "Books & more" and "Articles & more":
- either a "basic search" with only one search field (comparable to Internet search engines)
- or an "advanced search" for specific search options or search fields (e.g. call number)
You can "narrow your search" using filtering options (often called "drilldowns" or "facettes") once your search produces a hit list.
The search screens in both sections of the Catalog plus contain nearly identical search boxes. Keep in mind which data source is being searched in the different sections. For example the subject headings in the section "Books & more" are in German while those in the other section "Articles & more" are mostly in English.
Therefore please also consider German terms for your search.
Once you put the cursor in one of the search fields a help text appears to the left which corresponds to the search box where the cursor is active.
Because of the different data sources, there are no standardized subject headings or names. This means that you should consider names with or without abbreviated first name and words with or without umlauts.
Please use different spellings and synonyms as well as subject headings in different languages to perform an efficient search.
Truncation:
Search terms can be right truncated using an asterisk (*), e.g. "psych*" produces hits with "psychological", "psycho", "psychiatric". You can also truncate in the middle of a word: "tos*ana" for "toskana" or "toscana". There is no left truncation.
The asterisk (*) substitutes one or more letters, so we recommend using it when searching for abbreviated first names in the section "Articles & more", e.g. "Smith, H*". (Here the data sources are not consistent, some use abbreviated first names, others don't.)
Index:
We provide an index in the section "Books & more" for the search fields "Persons", "Subject headings" and "Corporate Name". You can use the index to identify the standardized term if you do are unsure of the correct spelling.
Unfortunately, due to technical reasons, there is no such index in the section "Articles & more".
Phrases:
You can search for phrases in all search fields by using quotation marks ("). This only produces hits with your search terms in exact this order e.g. within the title field.
Truncation is not possible while using phrase searches.