FA 178B: Seminar on Chinese Calligraphy and Practice

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:

"three perfections"

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

"three perfections"

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

records that include the word three and the word perfections but not the phrase "three perfections"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

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

calligraph* will search for

calligrapher, calligraphers, and calligraphers

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. china OR chinese

• 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.

• Is the item you want checked out by someone else? Ask for a recall.
• In a hurry? Get a Boston Library Consortium (BLC) card and borrow the item from a nearby academic library - use WorldCat to find which libraries own the item.
• Have a little more time? Request the item from another library through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).