Orbis: Yale's primary online public access catalog (OPAC):

Morris: Online catalog of the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale. The extensive Law collection is not represented in Orbis.

CRL: Online catalog of the Center for Research Libraries. CRL membership significantly expands Yale's research collections.

Special Catalogs exist for pre-1977 materials which do not appear in Orbis and catalogs for library materials not accessible through Orbis.

Arts • Beinecke • Divinity • Law • Medicine • Sciences • Social Sciences • Library Front Door

The collections of the Yale University Library are represented in multiple online catalogs and card catalogs. Together, Orbis, Morris (the Law Library catalog) and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) catalog constitute the Yale University Library online catalog.

• Use these catalogs to determine what materials (books, journals, archival collections, etc.) are held by Yale, and where these items are located.

• Materials published prior to 1977 that do not appear in Orbis (OPAC) can be located using the "union" card catalog in Sterling Memorial Library. More than one third of the Library collection is represented ONLY in the card catalog.

• There are also numerous Special Library Catalogs that provide unique access to the Yale Library collections. For example, Government Documents and Maps are NOT represented in Orbis or the SML card catalog.

• The Law Library maintains a separate online catalog called Morris.

• Additional materials purchased cooperatively are available through Interlibrary Loan from the Center for Research Libraries (CRL).

Please scroll down for detailed explanations of these catalogs.

Connecting to Orbis | How to Search Orbis | Online Orbis Tutorial

Operating Hours: Orbis is available 17 - 23 hours daily as detailed below.

Sunday:	Orbis begins at 7:00 a.m.;	ends 4:00 a.m. Monday	(21 hours)
Monday:	Orbis begins at 5:00 a.m.;	ends 4:00 a.m. Tuesday	(23 hours)
Tuesday:	Orbis begins at 5:00 a.m.;	ends 4:00 a.m. Wednesday	(23 hours)
Wednesday:	Orbis begins at 5:00 a.m.;	ends 4:00 a.m. Thursday	(23 hours)
Thursday:	Orbis begins at 5:00 a.m.;	ends 4:00 a.m. Friday	(23 hours)
Friday:	Orbis begins at 5:00 a.m.;	ends Midnight	(19 hours)
Saturday:	Orbis begins at 7:00 a.m.;	ends Midnight	(17 hours)

Connect to Standard Orbis (TN3270)
The standard text-based interface to Orbis requires a TN3270 telnet client and provides full support for diacritics and special characters.

Connect to Orbis on the Web

Key Features of Orbis on the Web:

• Complete and detailed holdings for multi-volume material (as in standard Orbis)

• Guide and index displays with cross references for navigation of large sets of retrieved records (as in standard Orbis)

• A graphical keyword search input form which makes the construction of complex keyword searches easy

• A combined author/title search option

• Improved reliability and response time (compared to the old WWW Orbis)

• Scrollable guide, index, and record displays for more efficient and convenient viewing or printing (as opposed to the multi-screen presentation in standard Orbis)

• Course reserve information

• Hot links to related Orbis records, to full-text and image databases, and to external Internet resources such as electronic journals

Connect to Orbis Telnet
Text-based Orbis, which requires a telnet client. Terminal Type is VT100 to log in.

Orbis Comments and Corrections
Please submit comments about or corrections to Orbis via the Library's online Suggestion Box.

Morris is the online catalog of the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale. These records are, for the most part, not duplicated in Orbis. Connect to the Telnet version of Morris (enter "library" at the login prompt).

The CRL Catalog is the online catalog of the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago. Its primary purpose is to collect those research materials not targeted by the North American research institutions. The Center collects heavily in the follow materials: archival materials, newspapers and periodicals (foreign & domestic, specialized), foreign doctoral dissertations, U.S. state documents, USSR Academic publications. The Center collects broadly in the following geographic regions: Africa, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. In addition, the Center collects any category of material, from any geographic locale, which is deemed important to scholarly research, but has not been acquired by other institutions. All resources in the CRL Catalog are available to Yale University faculty, staff, and students through Interlibrary Loan.   Connect to CRL (telnet).

The Sterling Memorial Library Card Catalog
Check the Sterling Memorial Library Card Catalog for pre-1977 materials that do not appear in Orbis. The union card catalog in the nave of Sterling Memorial Library contains 11,986 drawers, representing over 100 years of cataloging records for the fourth largest library in the United States. It contains cards for material in most, but not all, formats held by most, but not all, libraries in the Yale University Library system represented on a combination of handwritten, half-height cards; typewritten cards; and computer-produced cards. The current catalog represents the final evolutionary state of a living document that has changed over time as the content of catalog records, their format, and their arrangement have evolved under many codes of cataloging rules.

List of Other Catalogs at Yale
Catalogs for library materials not accessible, or not easily accessible, through Orbis or the SML Card Catalog. Although the card catalog in Sterling Memorial Library is commonly thought of as the Yale Library's "union catalog", it does not contain, in fact, records for all materials in all formats. Over the long history of the Yale Library, many special catalogs have been created to describe those collections not otherwise represented in the "union catalog" or, in more recent years, in the online catalog Orbis. These special catalogs have been created in a variety of ways: as handwritten indexes, in traditional card format, as published book catalogs, and more recently, as database files. For manuscript and archival collections, finding aids have been created to provide access to this type of material. Other special catalogs have been created to provide access to specific kinds of information about the collections: e.g. tracings for bindings, provenance information, imprint files, etc.

© 2001 Yale University Library
Last modified 09 April 2001.
Send comments to info@yalelibrary.edu.
This file is located at http://www.library.yale.edu/fdnew/