iFind is an online catalogue to search all resources provided by Swansea University Libraries and Collections, including physical items to loan or online resources that you can access within and outside of campus. You can find books, e-books, videos, articles, digital media and more.

We have made some advancements to the iFind system. The default search will now search across the whole of the physical and digital collections, including article level content rather than just titles and abstracts.

It would still be possible for you to change the search to look only at the title level by selecting the ‘Books and More’ filter. This will allow you to search a wider range of scholarly content and find resources more relevant to your research.

You can search iFind directly from the search bar on the library homepage and filter your searches by the following ways:

• Books & more – Resources in our libraries, e-books, online journals and databases
• Articles & more – Journal articles, conference papers, newspaper articles, reference entries and much more
• Cronfa – Swansea University institutional repository
• Everything – All the above Finding a Book

To find a specific book quickly use the author’s surname and one or two key words from the title. For example, to find “Doing a literature review in Health and social care” by Helen Aveyard, search for ‘Aveyard literature review’.

Search for complete phrases by enclosing them in quotation marks “ “. Words enclosed in double quotes will appear together in all results exactly as typed E.g. “social learning theory”. If the above is searched without quotation marks, this will show all searches for the individual words.

Try to include synonyms in your search. Use a thesaurus to find related or similar terms.

Use acronyms and full names (for example: CSO and Central Statistics Office).

Don’t forget to search for people, places and organisations related to your topic.

Truncation is a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings. For example, histor* will match all words that begin with histor (e.g., history, historical, historian, etc.) Truncation symbols may vary by database; common symbols include: *, !, ?, or #.

Identify words from different cultures e.g. rubbish/garbage/trash or variant spelling: catalog/catalogue.

Use a wildcard, (?), to substitute a symbol for one letter of a word. This is useful if a word is spelled in different ways but still has the same meaning e.g. colo?r to search for color and colour, or wom?n to search for woman and women.

By signing into your student account on iFind, you can:

• Request items for collection or delivery
• View your loans
• Save your items and searches
• View full search results as some items are restricted if you’re not signed in

Another useful feature on the iFind catalogue is ‘collection discovery’ within the ‘show more’ option in the top navigation (…). Any materials for specific themes can be found in collections such as the Egyptology collection or the Milne collection which covers the American Civil War. This also contains our Better Read and Wellbeing collections filled with non-academic texts such as fiction, self-help guides and more.