Get Help
Library faculty and staff are available by chat, phone, email, or in person to help with research questions.
Go to Ask a Librarian (available from the top of any OneSearch page), where you can get help about your account, find guides and FAQs on specific topics, and contact a librarian with expertise in your subject area to meet online or in person. You can also drop by Swirbul’s 1st floor Service Point.
OneSearch is a powerful search tool for discovering books, articles, databases and more. It makes use of bibliographic data both from Adelphi Libraries' own catalog and from external sources. This section explains in more detail what data sets are searched and where they come from.
Library Catalog
Adelphi Libraries maintain an exhaustive catalog of bibliographic data for the items they hold, both physical and electronic. Since the catalog is maintained by expert librarians and staff who are very familiar with Adelphi's holdings, it contains the most accurate information about the materials we hold. When you set your search scope to Library Catalog you are only searching this data. (See Search Scope in this guide for more information on this and other scopes.)
Adelphi Libraries catalog items at the more general or "title" level of complete works—books, journals and so forth. It does not contain information about each chapter of a book or article within a journal.
Central Discovery Index (CDI)
Adelphi partners with the company Ex Libris to provide discovery data far beyond our catalog. This data set encompasses searchable information about individual book chapters, journal articles, and items within databases. According to Ex Libris:
The Ex Libris Central Discovery Index (CDI) is a central, unified index, for scholarly and academic material worldwide. It contains over 5 billion records and many different resource types from thousands of publishers, aggregators, and repositories.
When you use the Everything search scope in OneSearch, you are searching both the catalog and the CDI together. By default the results returned will be items to which Adelphi has access, either by ownership or subscription (our "holdings"). Thus this kind of search is a powerful way to find relevant resources that you can access right away through the Library.
Searching Outside Adelphi's Holdings
Sometimes what you are looking for is not owned or subscribed to by Adelphi. You may still want to know about it, e.g., for a literature review on a topic, or you may be able to obtain it by other means, e.g., through Interlibrary Borrowing or at another library such as the New York Public Library or other community library.
To find items in the CDI that are not within Adelphi's holdings, you may enable the “Expand beyond Adelphi's Holdings” option in the search results sidebar.
If an item not within Adelphi's holdings is obtainable through Interlibrary Borrowing, you will see this option on the item page.
The following Venn diagram shows the relationship between the scopes of the catalog, CDI, and Adelphi's holdings.