Do you want to be able to find books, articles and other material using one search? Do you want to find material the University of Edinburgh Library owns in its collections or subscribes to online? Are you looking to use a variety of different information sources?

Searcher may be exactly what you are looking for.

Searcher is the Library’s resource discovery tool and allows you to search the Library’s Catalogue, e-journals and licensed collections i.e. what the Library owns and subscribes to, all in one search. It also lets you search beyond what the Library has in its collections and discover other resources and material that may be relevant to your research.

There are search boxes for Searcher on the Library homepage and in the Library tab on MyEd but you can also access Searcher at http://searcher.is.ed.ac.uk/

As of 1st April 2014, when you first do your search, Searcher will limit your results to All Library Resources, which includes print books, ebooks, ejournals and database content. You can narrow this to searching just the Library Catalogue (only results which appear in the Library Catalogue will display, this includes books, ebooks and ejournal titles but NOT ejournal content) or expand this to search out with the Library’s collections.

There are Basic and Advanced search options, various limiters are available to refine your search results, you can create your own account to save searches and results, and there are options for downloading/saving references.

Where full-text is available to you online then there will be a link to go straight through to this, the link may be slightly different depending on the source of the search result. Look out for the following links Click here for full text, PDF Full Text, HTML Full Text or findit@edinburgh.

More information about using Searcher can be found at learn more about Searcher. See also Searcher: BIG change.

If you find a book in the Library that is already out on loan (Not Available) then you can click on the Retrieve Catalogue Item link to place a request on the book – Requesting an item which is on loan.

If you find material that is not available within the Library’s collections then you may want to consider requesting the material via the Inter-Library Loans service, or visiting another library to access the material or in the case of a book you may wish to recommend this is purchased for the Library – Book recommendations.

If you want to do a more focused search in your subject area or are looking looking for material most relevant to your topic then you should use some of the online databases the Library subscribes to. Find these by subject area or through the Subject Guides.

Caroline Stirling – Academic Support Librarian for Social and Political Science.