A catalog is a “list of materials contained in a collection, a library, or group of libraries arranged systematically with descriptive details.”
— Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Examples of Catalogs:

• Mail order catalogs (e.g. L.L. Bean, East Bay)
• College Course Catalogs (e.g URI Catalog)
• Museum Catalogs (e.g Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Library Catalogs (e.g. The URI Libraries Search)

Since this is a library course, let's concentrate on library catalogs.

A library catalog “records, describes and indexes… the resources of a collection, a library, or a group of libraries. Each entry bears details of class number or call number to enable the item to be found, as well as sufficient details (such as author, title, date of publication, editorship, illustrations, pagination and edition) to identify and describe the [item].”
— Ray Prytherch, comp. Harrod’s Librarians’ Glossary. 8th ed. 1995, “Catalogues.”

The Catalog is:

• The key to the collections of any library
• The way to find out what the library owns
• A file of records for all of the information sources in the library's collections

Library collections can consist of:

• Books
• Magazines
• Journals
• Newspapers
• Reserve Readings
• Videos
• Audio Tapes/CDs
• Art Work
• Training Tapes
• Government Documents

Library catalogs are organized by:

• CATEGORY - LC subject headings
• ALPHABET - LC call numbers sit alphabetically on the shelf
• LOCATION - Which collection? Which Library?
• TIME - Information is time sensitive - dates matter!

There are things that the catalog CANNOT do. It can't tell you what is actually inside the covers of the books (chapters)  or tell you what articles are in the magazines, journals or newspapers. For these pieces of information we use different access tools. More on those later in the course.

Every item in the catalog has its own individual catalog record. Each of these catalog records includes important information, such as title and author, to help you to identify the item.  The record also tells what classification the item falls into as well as its location in the library.

Each item's record is divided into a number of parts. In a library catalog, each part of the record comprises a FIELD in the electronic record. So the Title of an item will be in the title field, the author(s) in the author field, etc.

Parts (fields) of the catalog record:

When you begin research on a topic, you generally don't know any important titles or authors in the field, so you would begin by searching for the subject of your research and not for an author or title. In library search tools you can search this way by Keyword or by Subject.

In searching a library resource you can have the search engine look at the whole record for your terms or it can look in specific fields. A Keyword search will look for your terms in all of the basic fields of each catalog record. It's a broad search that will retrieve records that include your "key words" in almost every part of the record. It is so broad that it will probably bring up many irrelevant records. Keyword searching is useful for "mining" more precise terms to help focus the research.

Example:
Keyword search "education and encyclopedia" will certainly bring up records for the encyclopedias about education that the library holds.

In a subject search, the catalog's search engine looks for your terms only in the Subject field. The catch is that the catalog uses a controlled vocabulary - Library of Congress Subject Headings - and your terms have to match LCSH to be effective. Using the right terms will bring highly relevant and focused results.

Example: Trying a Subject search for 'american civil war' will not retrieve any records because this is not a LCSH. The catalog may refer you to the correct LCSH, 'United States History Civil War, 1861-1865.'