IUCAT

Although knowing how to search in IUCAT is certainly the most important task to master, there are a few other features of IUCAT to be aware of.  This page highlights those features.  Read on to learn about My Account in IUCAT, what to do with Selected Items, how to view your Search History, and when to use the Ask a Librarian feature.

To access My Account in IUCAT, you will be prompted to enter your IU username and passphrase.  My Account shows you:

• What you currently have checked out and their due dates
• From here you can also renew materials online.  You can renew your checked out items individually, by clicking the gray Renew button next to the item, or click Renew All Items to renew everything you have checked out
• What delivery requests you're waiting on (Request Delivery)
• Quick access to the Interlibrary Loan request pages for each campus and library (the Law Library is third on the list - make sure to use ours!)
• This will also show you how to put in Recall requests at various libraries, to request an item that is currently checked out by someone else

IUCAT provides you a limited search history - limited to each active IUCAT session.  This will show you the searches you have performed during that session, with the ability to access those search results anew.  Searches will be shown in reverse chronological order, with the most recent first. 

If you have applied filters post-search, you will see these each as separate searches.

• For example: If you searched 'criminal law' then filtered by publication year and library, you will see
• 'criminal law, library: Bloomington - Law Library, publication year: This year' as one search
• 'criminal law, publication year: this year' as a second search, and
• 'criminal law' as a third search.

You also have the ability to clear your search history.

When you run a search in IUCAT, next to each search result, you will see a checkbox.  Checking a box makes it a Selected Item.  (Selected items can be helpful if you'd like to create a list of relevant titles on a subject, for example.)  You can access your list of selected items from the top of the page in IUCAT.  From your list of selected items, you can select or deselect all or individual titles.  You can then:

• Pull up citations for those titles (sorry, only MLA, APA, and Chicago available),
• Export these titles to EndNote or Refworks, if you use either of those citation managers, and
• Email the list of selected titles to yourself or someone else

When in IUCAT, you'll notice a link at the top of the page called Ask A Librarian.  Clicking this gives you three options:

• IUCAT Help - this will link to the IU Knowledge Base's repository of articles on IUCAT.
• Campus information - this links to the various campuses' websites for Indiana University
• Report error/Ask a research question - we would prefer that you contact our Reference Office with any IUCAT errors or research questions.
• Errors in IUCAT can occur for a number of reasons.  It would be best to report these errors to our reference librarians first.  Reporting them through IUCAT will send them to a librarian in Wells Library.
• Ask a research question will also send you to a reference librarian at Wells Library.  If you have research questions, please contact one of our librarians, or use our Ask a Librarian feature.