CHIN 3163: Taiwanese Literature and Film: How to Search

Search in GW catalog to find Chinese language materials:

Go to GW library homepage, next to the white search box you will see a blue box.  Hover over the blue box and select  Books & More. You can use Romanization system, simplified Chinese character or traditional Chinese to conduct search. 

1. GW catalog adopts Pinyin as the way to display Romanized Chinese characters.

Please consult the Wade-Giles to Zhuyin to Pinyin Conversion Table,  if you are more familiar with Wade-Giles or Zhuyin.

2. How to search the catalog with Pinyin?

In general, enter the Pinyin for each Chinese character with a space, such as ying han da ci dian for 英漢大辭典. However, sometimes you need to join syllables, especially for personal names and place names, examples:

3. How to search the catalog with Chinese characters?  

Chinese searches entered in keyword searches retrieve records across Chinese, Japanese and Korean.  Terms can be combined using Boolean operators; you can also combine terms in different languages -- Chinese characters, Japanese kana, Korean Hangul and English.  Character adjacency is the default, so combining characters will produce results for the compound not the single characters.

(This section is based on information from Chinese Studies Guide of Duke University Library)

1. Consortium Loan Service 

Example：

2. If GW or WRLC (consortium) do not have the material you need, you can use our FREE Interlibrary Loan Service. There are various ways you can use to place your request:

• If you know a title for a book/video, go to the ILL webpage, click Place or Check Requests, select George Washington, log in with your UserID and password, click New Request, select Book or Video, and fill in the bibliographic information as complete as possible. Then confirm the request. 
• Or, you can search your title in the WorldCat, you may double check GW's holding through clicking Find It@GW Libraries. If no holding found, click Check availability at GWU or request through ILL. It will direct you to the ILL webpage and fill the bibliographic information for you automatically. You only need to confirm the request. 
• For articles, you can use the same way as you request books/videos, just select Article rather than Book or Video when you place New Request. Or, you can search an article using library search box or a specific database and place an request directly from that page. 

Contact me (hey@gwu.edu) if you still cannot find and/or acquire the material you need.