HIST 301: Civil Rights Movement -- Professor Crosby: Advice on Searching Databases

An Asterisk (*) at the end of a term will allow you to search for different forms of a word with what you enter as a base.  For example:

will return Education, Educator, Educators, Educate, Educated

whereas

will return just Education exactly as you type it in.

This is a very simple and effective way of broadening the number of results you get.

PROXIMITY SEARCHING   Sometimes when you are searching a database, you find articles that have your search terms, but on separate pages of the article, only vaguely related to each other. In that case, the technique of Proximity searching would be helpful.  Proximity searching allows you to search for documents that contain two search terms, in any order, within a specified number of words.  Here is an example:

This search will retrieve articles in which the word diabetes appears within 5 words of the phrase clinical trials, whether diabetes comes first or after clinical trials.

Uncertain of where to start searching for your call number?
Check out the floorplan for the Upper Level. 

A longer explanation of LC call numbers.

Library of Congress Call Number Quiz

Quotations marks (" ") will group words as a phrase, ensuring they appear next to each other in the record. For example:

will return only articles that use those terms right next to each other.

whereas will return articles that may mention Great in one part of the record and Depression in another part of the record. 

Common searching errors:

#1 Getting the search logic wrong -- confusing "and" and "or"

WRONG!!!

WRONG!!! 

#2 Adding extraneous words

WRONG!!! 

#3 Being too specific

WRONG!!!