2 - Find Books - Education - Guides & Tutorials at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Related Guides

How to Search for Journal Articles
with step-by-step instructions on retrieving your most needed research articles.
Conduct a Literature Review
A guide to walk you through the process of doing a literature review

Find Books

Did you know that the Library has a collection of nearly 3.7 million books, nearly 3 million of which are e-books? To search the Library's collection, use OneSearch to retrieve books on your topic. You will find both popular and academic books to meet your needs.

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:

Search Tips

1 - Use keywords

2 - Use phrase searching

3 - Use alternate keywords

4 - Broaden your search.