What Do I Use Tripod For?
Tripod is the place to go when you're looking for books, dvds, cds, online databases or journal titles held by Haverford, Bryn Mawr, or Swarthmore. It is the Trico Libraries' online catalog. Everything we own or subscribe to should be in Tripod.
How Do I Search Tripod?
Searching Tripod can be as basic as a one-keyword search. If you don't know the name of the book you're looking for, try starting with one or two keywords that relate to your topic. For example, if you search for "louis xiv and rule", this is what your results will look like:
 Highly relevant titles entries 1-4 |
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 Very relevant titles entries 5-13 |
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Each result is listed in order of relevance, and after the title are the initials of the school that owns the book. The next column is the date of publication, and the icon on the right tells you whether the item is a book, a video, an e-book, etc. From here you can click on a title to get more information. Try clicking on one of the results. You'll find that newer books usually include chapter titles and summaries, and sometimes even excerpts from the book, so you can get a quick feel for how appropriate the book is for your research. Also, take a look at the subject headings listed below the call number and tables of contents. For example, for the second book in this list, the following subjects are listed:
Each of these subjects is a category assigned by a librarian to help classify the book and compare it to others in our catalog. Clicking on the subject heading will search for other books on the same subject. Right now we have 7 books in the Trico that are specifically about Louis XIV's influence, and notice that many of those didn't come up in our initial keyword search.
If you know what you're looking for, try a title or title/author search. When performing a title search use the exact title minus the initial article (a, an, or the). For example, to search for the title
Persian Letters, choose
title from the first drop-down menu, enter 'Frankenstein,' and hit enter. From here you'll see a results screen, and you'll see that there are in fact several copies of
Persian Letters in the Trico (some of them online), and more than just books. You can limit your search to just books by clicking on the "limit/sort search" button above the search box. Remember, title searches in Tripod also search chapter titles if they are cataloged.
What Do I Do If the Book I Want Is Not At Haverford?
If the book you want is checked out or only available at Bryn Mawr or Swarthmore, try requesting a copy from another library. Click on the orange request button at the top of the screen, enter your name, barcode, and library you want it delivered to, and hit go. Choose the item you want to request and hit the request button. Your book should be delivered within about a day.
If all copies of the book are checked out, your other option is
EZBorrow. EZBorrow searches most academic libraries in Pennsylvania and books ordered this way usually arrive in about three days.
Logging in to Tripod
By logging in to Tripod you gain access to information about your account such as your reading history, the books you've got checked out, and any interlibrary loans you've requested.
Literature resource center
The Times atlas of world exploration
button to find out if we have the cited reference in the Trico. A separate window will open up and either take you directly to an electronic version of the article, give you a link to check Tripod for a print copy, or tell you we don't have a copy. If we don't have a copy, don't worry! You can request most things from Interlibrary Loan by clicking on the ILL link, entering your name and barcode and submitting the request.