An online catalog is a computer version of a card catalog. It is a database that contains a record for every item the library owns. The internet or web version of the Scarborough-Phillips Library's is available from the library home page.

If you want to find out what books, videos and periodicals are available in the library, the catalog is the place to go. The catalog is not the place to locate periodical articles, only periodical issues. For example, the catalog would tell you the library owns all issues of the journal Nature from November 1964 through the current issue, but it would not tell you that the April 8, l999 issue contained an article titled, "Bantu banter and African roots." Locating periodical literature will be covered in Lesson 4.