| Help on the Library Catalogue |
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ABOUT THE CATALOGUE
The Faculty and Institute Library database covers the post-1900 books, journal articles and conference proceedings held at the three sites in Edinburgh, Oxford and London.It covers core information on actuarial science together with information on insurance (life and non-life), reinsurance, pensions, employee benefits, social security, investment, corporate finance, health and care and other new areas into which actuaries are moving. The libraries also acquire statistical publications on demography, economic indicators and marketing information. The majority of the libraries' materials are in English, although materials in other languages are not excluded.
Catalogue records have been made for books and journal articles, and you can search for many significant features of a document e.g. Author, Title, Date of book or article, Journal title. If you are unsure of the exact information, you can search all fields at once. Use * to search for various endings to a word.
Some books are available to buy from the Faculty and Institute Publications Unit. There is an option to buy on the relevant records in this database. Some papers are available on the Internet and where we have this information it is also included in the catalogue record.
HOW TO SEARCH
1. Type search terms in one or more boxes. You can use the Word Wheel button to see and select terms that are in the catalogue. You can toggle the buttons next to the boxes to use the different types of search:
AND means that the results must contain all the terms you enter
OR means that the results must contain one or more of the terms you enter, but not necessarily all of them.
NOT means that you specifically don't want to search for a particular term.
2. Click Search
3. Records that meet your criteria are displayed as a list for you to choose the items you need, and to get more information on these.
4. To go back to the search screen, use the browser's Back button, or the New Search button.
FINDING WORDS AND PHRASES
Type the word you want to find, e.g. 'insurance', or type a phrase, e.g. 'life insurance', to find records containing these words or phrases.To find variations based on word stems, type an asterisk at the end of one or more words (comput* tech*). Within the boxes use the symbols &, / or ! between words or phrases to represent AND, OR, NOT. Include a space before and after the symbol.
| Type this ... | To find ... |
| life insurance | those words, in that order |
| life / insurance | either word (or both) |
| life & insurance | only documents that contain both words (documents that contain just one of the words will be ignored) |
| life insurance ! Germany | life insurance but not related to Germany |
FINDING A PARTICULAR DATE
| You can specify | |
| A particular year e.g. 2000 | This only finds books and articles published in 2000 |
| A range of years by separating the two by a colon e.g. 1996:1998 | This finds books and articles published in any of the range of years indicated |
| A date should be greater than or equal to a specific year e.g. >=1998 | This finds books and articles published in or after 1998, right up to the present |
USING WORD WHEELS
If a search screen includes a Word Wheel button, click it to select words from a list. This opens a dialog that shows words you can search for. For example, if you click the Word Wheel button next to a box labelled "Author", you can see a list of authors (personal and corporate). By pasting an item such as 'Smith, John' into the box you can search for anything that John Smith has written. This eliminates trial-and-error searching and can help produce more accurate results.
CASE
The searches are not case sensitive so it doesn't matter if you use upper or lower case.
DISPLAYING RECORDS AFTER A SEARCH
A successful search finds one or more records, which are displayed in a brief form on your screen.
SEE MORE DETAILS ABOUT ONE RECORD AT A TIME
Click the link labelled "Full details". This will show you the full details of the item, including which Faculty/Institute site(s) it is held at.
JUMP TO THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT
Some records contain a hypertext link to the original document. Click on the "Jump to Document" button to go to them.Click the Next record and Previous record buttons to see further records found by your search.
Click New Search to start a new enquiry.
REQUEST ITEMS FROM THE LIBRARIES
Loans, up to 6 items, can only be made to members of the Faculty or Institute of Actuaries.Photocopies can be supplied to all users, subject to copyright regulations. A charge of 20p per A4 page is made for photocopies.
Add the items you want by clicking on the "Request item" button. You will need to close the Shopping Basket after each item is requested. Submit the form to the library using the "Request items in basket" button and continue as indicated. We will contact you with a quotation for the cost of copying for agreement, therefore it is vital that you include a daytime phone/fax number and a valid e-mail address.
Prepayment will be required from non-members, either by Visa/Mastercard/Switch or by sterling cheque (payable to Actuarial Resources).
If you are not eligible to borrow books we will inform you; there may be an alternative way that you can consult the material.