Get started with Discover , Whakamahia a Discover hei tīmata

To find what you need in the Massey library, start with Discover.

You can use Discover to:

• find specific items for your course
• look for books, articles and other information on your assignment topics.

Search with Discover

You can use Discover in the same way you would use other online search tools, such as Google.

• To find specific items, enter the book or article title into Discover.  For compulsory or recommended textbooks, and past exam papers, enter the course number (for instance, 139105).
• To find resources on a topic, enter keywords from the assignment question.

Watch our video guide to getting started with Discover

Read our guides to:

• planning your search
• searching for books
• articles.

Go to Discover to get started

Narrow your results

Use the Refine Results menu on the results page to see the most useful materials. You can filter by:

• the type of source you want to use – for example books, articles or ebooks
• publication date – useful if you only want to see recent publications, or ones from a particular time period
• other categories.

Get the items

In Discover, follow the links you are given to get any items you need. Usually the links are to:

• online material, such as articles and ebooks which you can get to immediately
• print books and articles, which tell you the location where you can collect it, or you can request it
• other items, which you may need library staff to help with.

Use different source types

Think about the type of source that will be most useful to you.

• Articles (journal, newspaper or magazine) give you specific, up to date information.
• Journal articles are the type of article often needed for assignments. They give you research information and are usually about very narrow topics. These are also called academic, scholarly, peer reviewed or refereed.
• Books give you broader, more comprehensive information. Some books are collections of specific chapters written by subject experts.
• Encyclopedias give you briefer background information and overviews. To find these, add "encyclop*" to your search words in Discover.
• Dictionaries give you definitions of key terms and basic concepts. To find these, add "dictionar*" to your search words in Discover.

Choose reliable sources

When you start learning about a topic, you'll usually get information from a variety of sources – but if you refer to a source in your university work, you need to make sure it's reliable.

Find out how to evaluate information

Visit OWLL to learn how to check your sources are reliable

Search beyond Discover

Discover searches across many databases at the same time. You may want to try other individual search tools, which can focus on a specific subject area, or source type, or give you different search features.

Some databases tell you how many times each article has been cited by other publications, which can be a sign of quality. Look for ‘cited by’ in Google Scholar and Scopus.

You can quickly transfer your search from Discover to Google Scholar by clicking on the Google Scholar link on the Discover results page.

Read our subject guides to learn which search tools to use