Searching by subject at the University Library

Subject searching by classification

Since 1994 all University Library resources have been indexed according to the Regensburger Verbundklassifikation (RVK). Besides, the holdings of most at the other libraries also follow the classes of the RVK.

An overview of the various RVK classes used at Humboldt libraries is given at RVK Online.

Our Online Tutorial is designed to help you in searches by subject on the basis of the RVK, or in the systematic search in our Primus Gateway.

Many of the older holdings are classified and ordered according to specific in-house systems common at a location. They will be explained to users in detail in the catalogue descriptions on the internet representation of each branch library.

Searching by subject headings (Schlagwörter)

Only some of the holdings of Humboldt University Library are indexed by standardized subject headings taken from the Gemeinsamen Normdatei, which is the AuthorityDatabase for the german libraries.  This meaningful but very complex procedure is used for those collections that can only insufficiently be indexed by the RVK classes and for specialist collections (Special Collecting Fields). At the Humboldt University Library subject areas such as Theology, African and Asian Studies as well as Ethnological Studies (Volks- und Völkerkunde) and Higher Education have been indexed in this way.

However, quite a few subject headings can be found via Primus. If you want to search for subjects-1 only you can use the OGND.

Subject searching by keywords

If the search is made across all fields "Alle Felder" (example), all data describing the resource searched and entered into the Catalogue will be processed. Since in the scientific literature titles and subtitles generally describe the contents very precisely, searching by keyword(s) will be fairly successful.