For dental health topics, books will be most useful to you in finding very small snippets of information. Most of our dental health collection consists of books which serve as "reference" books or research aids. Most of these books are not meant to be read cover-to-cover.
Our books tend to be on broad topics (Dental Therapeutics, Oral Surgery, Dental Materials), not on narrow topics like "the uses of a particular alloy in a particular situation." For that reason, you should search URSUS for broad terms like "Dental Materials" rather than focusing on narrower terms.
If you were interested in researching a gold-palladium-silver alloy, you wouldn't want to search URSUS for the phrase "gold-palladium-silver alloy." Instead, you'd search for the phrase "dental materials," since that's a broader term that describes specific materials used in dentistry. Then you might locate the book Phillips' Science of Dental Materials, which has a section on alloys.
URSUS is our library catalog. It is a list of all the books owned by the University of Maine System's libraries, plus the collections of the Maine State Library and Bangor Public Library.
If you know the author or title of a book, you can search that way (last name first, for authors), but if you just want to find books on a particular subject, "keyword" searching is usually the way to go.
You can limit books to a particular location.
You can click the "Request" button when you're looking at information about a specific book, and you can have the book sent to the Bangor campus, Augusta campus, or University College site or center. You'll need to enter your first and last name (the way it appears on your MaineStreet account ("Benjamin," not "Ben") and your 14-digit library barcode, typically found on your student ID. Please check with UMA Libraries if you do not know where to find your library barcode, or if your barcode is not working.
