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How to Search the Catalog

An introduction to searching the Lyman Beecher Brooks Library catalog for books & more. The library catalog searches the library's home collection. This includes books, e-books, journals, DVDs, and media that we own or have electronic access to.

Refining Searches

Effectively using filters is an important skill to develop and use alongside all kinds of searches, but especially important for keyword searches.

Filtering results in research databases and library catalogs is the same idea as filtering your shopping search results in Amazon. Filters let you restrict the larger pool of results to those that are likely to be useful to you.

These are some filters that are common in many databases and can be very helpful in making a large batch of results more useful:

  • Peer Reviewed / Scholarly
    • Limits your results to only peer-reviewed/scholarly content. This is a very helpful tool to make sure that your resources meet the requirements of your assignment if your professor requires peer-reviewed resources.
       
  • Full Text / Content I Can Access / Unlocked Green open lock icon. / Open Access Open access open lock symbol. / Free Free in a green oval icon.
    • These filters limit your results to only materials that you have full access to, i.e. a full length book, article, etc.
    • Without this kind of filter, your results list will often include index or abstract results that only present a description of the resource, but not the full material.
       
  • Item / Document type: book, ebook, article, journal, podcast, audiobook, DVD, case study, conference paper, etc.
    • Whether you are looking for a particular item type or just need to break up your results list into smaller pieces, filtering by item/document type can help you make your results list more manageable.
       
  • Publication date
    • For many assignments, professors will require that your sources are current or that they were published within the last 3, 5, or 10 years. Carefully check your assignment for the publication date requirement for your assignment and use this filter to make sure that all of your sources comply with the limitation.
       
  • Language
    • Many databases include results in multiple languages. If you do not want results in multiple languages, use this filter to limit to a single language or selection of languages to meet your needs.
       
  • Subject
    • Use the Subject filter to limit your results to the subject area that is appropriate for your research. This is very helpful for differentiation when your search term has multiple meanings. For example, if you are using the search term "Tesla", you can use the Subject filter to differentiate between resources about Nikola Tesla and the electric car manufacturer.

When your topic is too broad, you will get more results than you need. To narrow your topic, ask yourself the following questions (they will also help generate more keywords):

  • What is the time frame I am interested in?
    • Example: All wars or wars in the 21st century?
  • What location am I interested in?
    • Example: Wars globally or wars in South America?
  • What people am I interested in?
    • Example: All military officers or only generals?

You can also add delimiters to your search, such as only searching for books or for academic journals.

The Library search offers these limiters: location in the library, type of material, language, date of publication, and publisher.

 

If you need to widen your search to increase your results, consider the following:

  • Do you need to broaden your topic?
  • Don't search for all your keywords at once.
  • Think about what other keywords you could use (use a thesaurus, if necessary).
  • If you have delimiters on your search (for example, you're only searching periodicals), remove them.