Finding book chapters on your topic
Sometimes you might do a search for books on your topic on the Library Search and not find very many – this can happen when you have narrowed down a topic quite a lot. It’s quite possible that your topic is so niche that there aren’t many titles written specifically about it.
If you experience this we recommend that you look for book chapters – even if there aren’t a lot of whole books about your topic there are probably book chapters written in more general texts.
Chapters from print only books
We also wanted to share some tips for finding relevant book chapters (from print only sources) using Library Search using sites where you can view book previews.
Try a few different keywords when you conduct your search
When you are searching for any resources it’s a good idea to think of a few relevant keywords – for example don’t just search for marketing -you could also search for branding or promotions.
When browsing your results consider titles that seem more general
Don’t just look for your particular keywords in your results – for example if you do a search for ‘social media and aviation’ don’t just look for the words ‘social media’ in the title of your results – think about what wider books could include these subjects. Explore some of the more general titles – there is a reason books are showing up in your search results – at this point we’d recommend checking the contents of any potential books.
Check the Contents of the books that are broadly about your subject
We’ve recorded a short video about how to search preview the contents pages of many books online using Google Books or Amazon:
If you cannot find a preview of a table of contents you can ask library staff to scan the table of contents from a book we have in stock. Library staff will check copyright and if it’s ok we will scan and email you the contents page to help you choose a chapter.
How do I access a chapter if the book is not available online?
On Campus Students: If the Library has a print copy you can borrow it. For books that are not in Library Collections you can request book chapters through interlibrary loan – this is where we will try and obtain it for you from another Library.
Distance Learners and overseas partner students: If the Library has a print copy you can request a chapter through the Document Delivery Service. For books that are not in Library Collections you can request book chapters through interlibrary loan – this is where we will try and obtain it for you from another Library.
