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RELS-355

Finding Background Material: Getting Started with Omni

Omni offers enhanced discovery and delivery of information resources at Queen's, our partner institutions, and beyond. Implementation of this tool involved collaboration among 18 Ontario partner university libraries.  Please contact your subject librarian for a consultation on advanced research approaches within your discipline.

Please note: Omni times out after 30 minutes of inactivity, resetting itself to the default search page. 

To work from off-campus, log in to the Off-Campus Access link on the library homepage. This is the gateway to full-text library content. The Omni Sign in link below is to manage your account and enable access to full text if you haven't already logged in. If you search Omni and click a link to an online resource without Off-Campus login, you will be prompted to give your NetID.

Sign in first to:

  • Update your profileSign in for more options.
  • Check loans and requests
  • Renew materials
  • Identify loanable resources
  • View your search history
  • Access Favourites
  • Create alerts

What is in Omni?

Access to multiple formats including books, articles, videos, maps, government documents, music, data sets, open access materials, and more. You can discover materials that are not available at Queen's (excluding e-books) but that you can freely request either within Omni or through interlibrary loan.

When to use Omni?

You want to find:

  • Background information 
  • Several articles to get started
  • An exact book or article title
  • Various formats (e.g. books and newspapers)
  • Sources on an interdisciplinary topic 
  • Local and/or unique resources

If you find it difficult to narrow your results, consider using a disciplinary database as recommended in the subject-specific Research Guides.   

Finding Books

To find books in Queen's Library you can search QCAT. QCAT is the Queen's Library Online Catalogue. It is a searchable database that lists materials (books, journals, magazines, newspapers, videos, government documents, maps, microfilm and much more) found in all the libraries at Queen’s. QCAT also contains the names of the electronic resources to which Queen's Library subscribes, such as electronic journals and books. QCAT does not contain articles. To locate articles, use an index/article database or Summon.

In this module, we will look at three of the most commonly used search options for finding books: title, author, and keyword/keyword Boolean. We will examine the different parts of the library catalogue record, how to read a call number and how to locate a book in the Library. To wrap up this module, we will look at using Summon to locate books.