 You may already be familiar with Google Books. Google Books is a powerful service offered by Google that searches the full text of books and other items that have been scanned into its system, and it's huge. As of April 2013, Google Books databases included over 30 million scanned books. Enter a search term, Google searches, retrieves, ranks, and displays results. And often, Google Books even provides at least a percentage of viewable content. So you might already be taking advantage of Google Books, but in this brief video I'd like to make sure that you're aware of another important resource easily accessed through Google Books, WorldCat. WorldCat is a service that displays the holdings of tens of thousands of libraries both throughout the United States and across the globe. Used together, these powerful tools can greatly enhance your research. We'll spend a few minutes talking about how to effectively navigate between Google Books and WorldCat for better research. Before we begin, however, let me say a few words about search language. When we Google something, our search terms reflect natural language. We enter whatever terms we naturally use to describe our topic and Google fetches results. However, databases like library catalogs use controlled language to organize information and make it findable. For more explanation of the differences between controlled and natural language, please watch my video, Making Search Terms Work. But here, let me simply illustrate this difference using Google Books and WorldCat. An easy way to access Google Books is simply to Google it. On the initial search screen, enter your search terms. Let's try N, T, right and resurrection. Now, I realize that I might have simply searched N, T, right, resurrection, leaving out the AND and adding punctuation, and my results will be very similar. But I want to get into the habit of separating out the various concepts of my topic using the word AND. This practice helps me to recognize that searching for a particular topic involves the intersection of concepts. And while it may not be as important when doing natural language searching in Google Books, attention to details like omitting punctuation and separating out concepts becomes more significant when researching in article databases and library catalogs. So it's a good practice and you can see that even in Google Books, the word AND can make a difference in the results retrieved. Now, Google retrieves, ranks, and displays results as Google does. Perhaps the process is mysterious, but it should suffice to recognize that Google uses your own search history as well as the commercial potential of particular items to rank your retrievals. In other words, both your perceived preferences and the potential for profit affect the order in which your results are displayed. This is in fact a danger for natural language searching. You don't know what you didn't find. A wealth of resources may be hidden from view simply because your language, the terms you naturally selected to describe your topic and your location, Google retrieved these particular results and ranked them in this particular way. So be careful, play with the language and use multiple search strategies. Nevertheless, beginning your research with natural language in Google Books can help you identify better terms for research. Books that say preview offer at least a percentage of viewable text. Keep in mind that what you are seeing is usually a scanned image of the book itself. In other words, this is the book itself, but it's coming at you through the screen instead of the page. You can search for specific language within the text of the book in this box. I want to invite you to explore the many options and resources offered by Google Books. There are tutorials online, but just spending some time enjoying the site, creating an account so that you can save books in a personal library and learning about different features will be invaluable as you make Google Books a go-to resource for research. Now let me draw your attention to a rather unassuming feature, the Find in a Library link. After clicking on an item's title, sometimes the link's immediately visible. Sometimes you must access it by opening the Get This Book in Print menu. And occasionally, the link does not appear at all, an issue which I'll address in a moment. Clicking the Find in a Library button takes us to WorldCat, which, as I mentioned, displays the holdings of tens of thousands of libraries worldwide, but the services offered by WorldCat are truly beneficial. And by the way, you can search for books that do not offer the Find in a Library option here. Just access WorldCat through the Find in a Library button for a different book. Now first, let me point out that the item's citation can be found in various styles here. Second, WorldCat looks for libraries nearby that own a copy of the item. This book is owned by Oklahoma Christian, and clicking the link leads directly into our catalog's item display. Third, note that if you are connected to Oklahoma Christian University, you can use the Interlibrary Loan feature displayed here as Request This Item. If our library does not own the item, and if you need to access more content that is available on Google Books, then you can request the item here by filling out the required information, click Submit, and our Interlibrary Loan Officer will be notified of your request. Fourth, I want to draw your attention to these terms here. These are called subject headings. Remember, library catalogs and similar databases are built around controlled language, official terms used to consistently describe information items, to organize them and make them findable. And controlled language searching can be much more effective than natural language searching for finding relevant resources. Now as a side note, if you want to get more familiar with using controlled language, especially when searching within databases provided by EBSCO, please see my video on using EBSCO databases. So, clicking on Eschatology, for example, retrieves all books in the WorldCat database associated with the subject headings. Results can be limited on the left, or they can be resorted here. But to really access the benefits of WorldCat, click OCLC First Search here, and this will open the WorldCat system associated with our library. For more detailed information on searching within WorldCat, see my two videos, Accessing WorldCat and Searching WorldCat. But let me mention a few things. Here we have the citation page for this item, and much of the information available on the previous page is available here as well. Now, I'm interested in using the database's controlled vocabulary, its subject headings, to search for related items. So one way to do this is to click the subjects button here, and then click the subject heading that I'm interested in researching. Note that items available at Oklahoma Christian are clearly marked. Also note that this subject heading retrieved a lot of results, but all are related to the subject eschatology. Now I can refine these results in several ways, but let's do this. Click Searching. Then let's refine our search by specific vocabulary. I'll enter Christ's asterisks and parts of the word resurrection within asterisks, because the asterisks allows me to look for multiple forms of the word, like Christian, Christianity, or resurrection, resurrected. And I'll also limit this search to books and not juvenile. Then click Search. Now this strategy considerably less than the number of results, but I can be fairly certain that these books are very relevant to my general topic. So we have Google Books and WorldCat two very useful resources for locating important information for your research. Skillful navigation between Google Books and WorldCat empowers students not only with the resources these powerful tools offer, but also with the advantages of both natural language and controlled language searching. If you have any questions, feel free to ask the library and be sure to check out the other video research guides brought to you by the Beam Library at Oklahoma Christian University.