Which tool to choose?   Try both -- you will get different "book" results from the same search in the two databases.

• Library Catalog  --  Lists 750,000+ books (and some other materials) in Leyburn Library, Telford Science Library, and the Law Library, as well as online books available to W&L researchers.  
• "Search Everything -- Books"  --  Contains everything from the library catalog, plus thousands of electronic books to which we have access, but do not own.  Important: Select the "Content Type -- Book / eBook" option, either before or after your search.

The preferred method for searching these databases probably is a keyword option, which allows you to combine terms and/or to search for various forms of a term.   You can use an asterisk (*) in keyword searching to substitute for 1 to 5 characters, thus allowing you to expand a search.   Example: environment* will find environment, environmental, environmentally, environmentalist, etc.

Here are some sample keyword searches:

• ethnic* AND assimilat*  --  catalog results  /  "search everything" results
• france AND (muslim* OR islam*)  --  catalog results  /   "search everything" results
• "interracial marriage"  --  catalog results  /  "search everything" results

Interlibrary Loan (ILL) enables current W&L undergraduate students, faculty, and staff to use other libraries' collections to borrow books or other printed materials and/or receive electronic copies of articles.

Doctoral dissertations are not published books, but can be considered book-length scholarly studies.
W&L subscribes to a database which offers the complete texts of over 1 million dissertations and theses.