KEYWORD SEARCHES: Try keywords searches to find a few likely books, then view and click on the "official" subject headings in the full record. For example: If you do a keyword search on UNITED STATES MEXICO BORDER, and look at the full record of relevant items, you'll see the Subject term MEXICAN-AMERICAN BORDER REGION. Clicking on that Subject heading, or typing that exact phrase as a Subject or General Subject search, will bring up many hundreds of results.
SUBJECT HEADINGS: Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are the subject terms used to catalog books in most academic libraries. They are often not intuitive, and must be entered very precisely; starting out a search by doing a search in UC Library Search, then filtering by Subject, often produces no results.
UC Library Search: Massive shared site listing books, journals, articles, newspapers, government publications, maps, primary sources, reference works, audiovisuals, and much more, from holdings across UC and beyond; many items include embedded direct links to associated owned, subscribed, or open access online databases and sites. Search results can be faceted to limit to certain formats, publication dates, languages, and such. Includes request options for delivery/loans from other institutions.
Circuit: This consortium features the combined catalogs of UCSD, SDSU, USD, plus the San Diego City and San Diego County public library systems, for books only. Books may be requested online and are often delivered with a few days. (Recent, popular public library books are often in high demand and can take longer to arrive.) Books are checked out, renewed, and otherwise treated as UCSD materials.
HathiTrust: The HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and a vast library holdings research platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and copyrighted content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives. Content is full-text searchable; most items published before 1929 are full-text viewable and downloadable, and nearly all US federal government publications offer full-view rights. Historical journals and books content within is quite rich.
Internet Archive: A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more, with many deep holdings of digital scans of older, even rare books and pamphlets from major research libraries. Much printed content is open access, but other items require a free, personal IA account login to read fully.
