Searching the Melvyl® Catalog (via Telnet)

The Melvyl catalog contains records for materials (books, journals, movies, maps, music scores and recordings, computer files, dissertations, government documents, etc.) held by the libraries of the ten UC campuses, Hastings College of the Law, the California Academy of Sciences, the California Historical Society, the Center for Research Libraries, the Graduate Theological Union, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. All publication dates are included. The database contains over 25,000,000 records, and most campuses update their holdings on a weekly basis.

Use the FIND command to search for book (including other materials listed above) and periodical (or journal) records. The primary indexes for books include:

Personal Author	AU, PA, PN, Author
Exact Personal Author**	XAU , XPA, XPN, Exact author (lastname, firstname)
Corporate Author	CA, CN, Corporate Author
Exact Corporate Author	XCA, XCN, Exact CA, Exact CN
Title Words	TW, Title
Exact Title**	XT, Exact Title (title begins with)

The primary indexes for periodicals include:

Periodical Title Words	PE
Exact Periodical Title**	XPE, Exact PE (periodical title begins with)
Series	SE, Series
Subject	SU, Subject
Exact Subject**	XS, XSU, Exact Subject (subject heading begins with)

**Note: You must always end your exact index searches with a truncation sign, * or ?

For example:

FIND CA CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
FIND PA WALKER, ALICE
FIND SU BACTERIAL GENETICS
FIND FIND XS AMERICAN PROSE LITERATURE WOMEN AUTHORS?
FIND PE DIGEST SOVIET PRESS
FIND XPE NEWSWEEK*

Use the DISPLAY command to display the records that result from your FIND command. Type DISPLAY (or D) for a Short display with author, title, and call number. You can also use the LONG or REVIEW options. For example:

DISPLAY      DISPLAY LONG      D REVIEW

Other DISPLAY options include the following:

CIT	Bibliographic citation, no holdings
LONG	Full bibliographic citation with holdings
REVIEW	Author, Title, Date, no holdings
TAGS - SHORT	Short bibliographic citation with field tags, no holdings
TAGS	Default Tags display, same as TAGS-SHORT
TAGS - LONG	Full bibliographic citation with field tags, no holdings
MARC	Full MARC record

You can only have one display option in your DISPLAY command.

FIELDS option

You may specify one or more fields for a custom display. For example: D 1-5 AU TI CT (This will display author, title, and series.)

Type HELP with a term at any time to receive assistance. HELP and EXPLAIN can be used interchangeably and can be abbreviated as H and E.

Use an EXPLAIN command at any time to receive an explanation. For example:

EXPLAIN FIND	EXPLAIN DISPLAY
EXPLAIN INDEXES	EXPLAIN COMMANDS