FA 34A: History of Asian Art

Finding Books, Journals, and Videos: Searching the Library Catalog

Use Brandeis Library OneSearch to search the online catalog of the Brandeis Library. Choose the Library Catalog option (the default) to search for books, journals, and videos in the library collections.

• If you have already identified the book(s) you need, you can use the Advanced Search to search by Title or by Author to locate the item(s) in the library.

• If you are trying to identify books that will be useful for your research, search by keyword, and use the Subjects listed in the left margin to find related materials.

• Remember to enclose search phrases in quotes:

"floating world"

This ensures that the database will return results that include the entire phrase

"floating world"

rather than records that contain both of these words, but not your search phrase:

records that include the word floating and the word world but not the phrase "floating world"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

• To search for more than one variant of a term, use truncation:

buddh* will search for

buddha, buddhist and buddhism

The database searches for any word that begins with the letters that precede the truncation symbol (in this case, an asterisk). Some databases use other symbols, such as a question mark, for truncation.

• If you want to broaden a search, you can revise it by including your original term with a related term in an "or" search:

ex. daoism or taoism

• To exclude a word from your search, use the term NOT. For example, you can exclude Chinatown from a truncation search for chin*:

    chin* NOT chinatown

• See the box on Boolean logic for more about this search technique.