What are you searching?
Anyone can search our discovery service Find It@USC.
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Sign-in to make requests, see your Library Card, renew books and some other features.
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Users will need to enter their USC network username and password in order to view online articles and books (anything restricted to current USC students, faculty and staff).
Basic Definitions
Primo VE pronounced Primo V, the version of the public interface we are using. If you look at documentation or follow the Primo listserv, sometimes it does matter if it is Primo or Primo VE.
Find It@USC What we named it.
Alma The behind the scenes system used by staff for acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, etc.
Scopes/Search Profiles
Libraries can customize the labels. We've given these names to the scopes/search profiles. Libraries can also make different decisions when it comes to configuration.
| Label | What's in it |
| Articles, books and more |
Content from Central Discovery Index [CDI] + USC Libraries Central Discovery Index has over 5 billion records for scholarly and academic material worldwide. Metadata (the informaton about the item) for records of many different resource types come from thousands of publishers, aggregators, and repositories. We've set ours so the default will find material our users will be able to access. If you want to search all of CDI, enable "add results available by Interlibrary Loan" Online resources are searched more deeply in this profile. The results can include items where words are in the full text of the online article or ebook. But this doesn't mean that the fulltext of all online resources are searched or that all of an online item is searched. |
| USC Libraries | Print and online holdings. Content you'd find in a library catalog. Journals (online or print), but not articles. |
| PASCAL Delivers |
Holdings from other PASCAL Libraries that are requestable (you won't find ebooks that are restricted to another PASCAL library). Besides searching PASCAL libraries, we've set ours to include our materials as well. Helping someone and finding books is especially important? With the Availability filter, "Physical items@USC" it's easy to either restrict to or exclude materials in our collections. |
| Course Materials |
Online and print books. To search by course, enter the prefix with number immediately after or use the wildcard. Ex. chem333 or chem* If the Libraries' Course Materials Support (eReserve) scanned a chapter or article, students will find it in their Blackboard course site. |
Comparing Find It & Subject Databases
Technically, Find It is not searching the databases. Some of the sources found in databases are also in Find It, but there's good reasons to search a database.
| Find It @ USC Libraries | Subject Specific Databases |
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Find It gathers metadata (all the info that describes something) from a LOT of sources--publishers, database creators, library catalogs, etc. The same thing might not be described the same way. You may see separate records for what to you looks like and is the same thing. Because it is so wide-ranging and diverse, to get the most out of Find It try a lot of different searches using a variety of keywords. |
A database like America History and Life, Engineering Village, Education Source, PsycINFO, or PubMed concentrates on the literature of a discipline. Databases add value by assigning consistent descriptors/subject terms. A big part of searching a specialized database effectively is making sure you are including terms the database uses. Look and see if the database has a thesaurus or index of subject terms. |
Metadata
Both records point to the same thing, but the supplied metadata differs. Among the differences, the resource type (Article, Review) and the article title.
Search the entire Central Discovery Index
In any scope/search profile that includes content from the Central Discovery Index [CDI] , the default is to return only results that are accessible to the patron--either available online or in print in the libraryies. For us, means searching in Articles, books and more.
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We renamed the option to expand the results to be more explicit. Some librarians find it handy to direct users to this option to initiate the Interlibrary Loan process. |
The default label is "Expand My Results." Some libraries may have chosen to not display it at all or named it something else. |
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There is an option to toggle on/off a search of full text indexing in CDI. We've chosen NOT to display this option.
Want to know even more? Ex Libris Central Discovery Index - Overview and more documentation (Ex Libris Knowledge Center)
CDI Statistics (includes link to content contributors, scroll to bottom)