Guides & Tutorials: OneSearch Discovery Platform: Find Books in OneSearch

Find Books

OneSearch
Course Readings

The quickest way to find books is through a direct search in OneSearch. You may search by Keywords, Title of the Book, Call Number, or an ISBN number.

Watch the short tutorial below to learn how to find and access e-books and print books in OneSearch.

You may also refer to the steps below:

Visit the Library homepage. Type in your keywords or title of the book and hit the search button. (You may also switch to the "Books & Media+" tab which will limit your search to books and physical AV materials only)
Limit results to "Books" under Resource Type on the right panel of the page. You may further refine results to "Physical items" (which means print books only), or "Full Text Online" (which means e-books only).
Click on the book title to see more information about the book.
For print books, the location is described by its Call Number. You will need to find the book from the bookshelf and check it out at the Service Counter at P/F (see below for How to Read Call Numbers).
For e-books, sign in with your NetID and NetPassword to get access to the full-text of the book.

Look for Course Readings?

You can find course reading materials (e.g. textbooks) prescribed by your instructors for specific courses from the "Resource List" page of your course page on Learn@PolyU. If "Resource List" page is not available, an alternative way is to go to the library homepage and search under "Course Resource List".

Learn more about Resource List in this guide.

Watch this 1-minute video to learn how:

Access & Download E-Books

The way to access an e-book can be different depending on the platform the book is located. Some platforms allow you to download the whole book in PDF with one click, while some allow downloading a limited number of pages per day due to copyright restrictions.

Here are a few commonly seen examples from e-book databases:

⦿ Full book download allowed. Usually, books directly offered by publishers offer full book or chapter download options.

Click to see an example from Springer

(Link to this book on OneSearch)

⦿ Limited no. of pages download per day. Two major e-book providers - ProQuest and EBSCOhost- offer this option. Note that some popular books may only allow online reading. There is no limitation if you read the book online.

Click to see an example from ProQuest

(Link to this book on OneSearch)

Click to see an example from EBSCOhost

Other than downloading a limited no. of pages to PDF, you may also "Borrow" the whole book for a specified no. of days and read it offline after installing the Adobe Digital Editions app.