Click on a topic (and quickly so because the topic panel changes at regular intervals). After clicking, you will see a list of matching titles.

Click on an item's title to view its record. Many records contain reviews, which you can read to determine if the book interests you.

Alternately, you can click on an author's name to view other titles by that author, or you can click the "Find Similar" button near each title to locate similar works.

To the right of search results you will see a "Refine Results" panel with Genre, Topic, Location, Setting, Timeframe, Character Traits, Reading Level, and Award links.

Clicking any of these produces fewer results limited by the criteria you click on.

To the left of the search results list is (if you have Adobe Flash - see Technical Notes below) a graphical window called AquaBrowser. After each search, the AquaBrowser produces a variety of topics and names you can click on to explore potentially related items of interest in the database.

Search results can be sorted by Relevance (the default), Year of publication, the Title of a work, or an Author's last name.