What is the difference between the library catalog and Quick Search discovery tool? Which one should I use?
Answer
The library catalog is an inventory of Rensselaer Libraries’ holdings, both physical and electronic. This includes books, ebooks, journals at the title level, videos, and more.
Quick Search is a webscale discovery service. It is easy to think about the discovery tool as a commercial search engine, like Google or Bing, but for the Rensselaer Libraries. The discovery service contains all of the material in the catalog and Rensselaer Digital Collections, but it also contains individual journal articles and news articles as well as other database content. The metadata can also be expanded using filters to broaden your search for articles we do not own for interlibrary loan requests.
Both search tools have their strengths and weaknesses. The catalog is better if you are looking for books or ebooks. The discovery tool is better if you want many results from different Rensselaer owned databases. It is particularly useful if you want to get articles in your search results.
