Primo is OCOM Library's catalog. You can use it to search for physical materials like books and DVDs, as well as items from our PAHL consortium partners (NUNM, UWS, and OHSU). In addition to physical items, you can search for eBooks, electronic materials, journal articles, and more! This guide will help you learn how to search for items in Primo and how to use your library account to renew materials, request holds, and request digitization.
It's super easy to get started with a catalog search from the library homepage. The large search box on the homepage is our catalog search! Get started typing in a subject or a title of an item and hit search and Primo will show you what we've got. The default search looks for items owned by the OCOM library, if you want to search for items held by one of the PAHL schools or journal articles, you will need to change your search scope.
The default search scope is set to limit your search results to show materials from all of the PAHL schools (OCOM, NUNM, UWS, and OHSU), but you can quickly change the scope to fit your search needs. The first option from the dropdown menu is to search only OCOM material. The second tiered option ("OCOM + PAHL") shows materials not only from OCOM, but from the PAHL libraries (OHSU, NUNM, and UWS) as well. The third tier shows material from the options above, as well as a large number of journal articles and electronic publications.
With the OCOM-only search, you will receive the fewest number of hits, and these will mostly be print books or video. All of these items are available at the OCOM Library. Note in the image below that for the keyword search, "acupuncture and pain," there are 252 results.
Selecting OCOM + PAHL will show more results, as you are searching four libraries instead of just OCOM. Note that the same search phrase brought up 372 hits, 120 more items than if you just searched OCOM's collection.
When you include articles in the search, your result numbers will likely take a large jump! The same search from the previous slides now reports over 15,000 items. And this is only items that OCOM has access to. You can use Primo to search for items that are not available through OCOM and always submit an ILL order if you come across something cool.
Questions? Comments? Contact us to get the help you need!