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USP 193: San Diego Community Research: Find Books

Find Books

Use UC Library Search to find books, ebooks, films/videos, government publications, etc. about your topic that are available at UC San Diego and/or other UC libraries.

I strongly recommend going directly to the advanced search screen and selecting "UC San Diego Library Catalog" to start your search.

Begin with a keyword search, for example

"san diego" AND "north park"

"san diego" AND ("logan heights" OR "southeastern san diego")

"san diego" AND demographics

"san diego" AND community plan*
    (Note that the * is a truncation symbol, i.e. plan* returns results for plan, plans, planning, etc.)

When you find a record for a book that looks useful, take a look at the subject headings. In UC Library Search, these subject headings are clickable links that run a new search. Searching by these subject headings may help find resources that don't turn up with an initial keyword search. They might also give you ideas of other search terms to use in your keyword search.

See the main USP library guide to see common urban studies-related subject headings.

Library Catalogs

UC Library Search is the first stop for finding books, journals, documents, maps and all other material located physically in the UCSD libraries, as well as online resources purchased for your use.

You can use the same catalog to find materials at other UC libraries and Worldcat, which searches libraries worldwide. Requests from other libraries can take up to three weeks to arrive, so start your research early!


Bonus search tip: Having trouble finding relevant books using the online catalog? You can search the full text of many books using Google Books to identify books of possible interest, then do a title search in the library catalogs to determine if we have access.

Circuit is a shared library catalog that searches the holdings of San Diego-area university libraries and public libraries.

If a book you need is already checked out at UCSD, or if or we don't own a book that you need, check in Circuit. If it’s available at another San Diego Circuit library, it can be delivered to UCSD in 1-3 days.

Interlibrary Loan

If a book or article you want isn't available at UCSD, the Circuit libraries or other UC libraries, try our free Interlibrary Loan service. We'll try to locate the item at another library and request it for you.

More info on finding books...