Summon is the UBC Library's meta-discovery tool that provides a single starting point to find and to access the majority of the UBC Library collections - including books, ebooks, scholarly journals and articles, newspaper articles, dissertations and theses, videos, maps, manuscripts, music scores, digitized items, and more.
Summon is very fast and excels at finding print books, ebooks, journal articles, film and media, and a multitude of other resources using keyword searching. It's a good starting point for research. Summon only indexes about 80% of our articles and doesn't cover some full text resources such as the Oxford reference guides and handbooks so you should also use specialized databases for your research. Use the Advanced Search if you want to search by specific fields (i.e. author, title, call number, subject headings, etc.).
When searching using Summon, it's important to use quotation marks around phrases. For example, try searching monkey beach and notice the number of results returned; then redo the search using quotation marks "monkey beach" and review the results. Try narrowing your results to books/ebooks; clear the filter and then try journal articles.
You can also use Summon to find a known journal article quickly. For example, try searching for this article ""Black States": Diasporic Affect in the Prose of Dionne Brand" by David Chariandy published in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2016, Volume 34, pp. 87-102.
Library of Congress Subject Headings
Many library catalogues use Library of Congress Subject Headings for subject description. These subject headings:
Reliable searching depends on understanding the relationship between natural language and deliberate subject description. The latter structures and controls natural language. Use of controlled subject headings or a thesaurus eliminates synonyms, defines a hierarchy of inclusion (broader than, narrower than), and indicates some less precise semantic connections.
When you are starting your research on a topic, look at the subject headings assigned to the materials you find that are on topic. Often you will find ideas for other subject terms and keywords that will help you to find more relevant materials held in the Library.
Document Delivery - materials at the UBC Okanagan library can be sent to a UBC library branch in Vancouver
InterLibrary Loan - will borrow or provide access to materials that are owned by another library
Suggest a Book Form - send us suggestions for materials you would like us to add to UBC Library collections (or you can email me!)