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“Brandeis

FA 169: Ecology and Art

Course Guide created for Professor Peter Kalb by Lisa Zeidenberg, Creative Arts Librarian

Boolean logic

OneSearch

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.

Search tips

  • Remember to enclose search phrases in quotes:

"global warming"

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

"global warming"

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

records that include the word global and the word warming but not the phrase "global warming"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

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

environment* will search for 

environmental and environmentalism

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.

  • Begin with a keyword search of your topic:

"global warming"

and note the related subject headings that come up in relevant results:

Climate change

  • You can also expand your search by including a related term in an "or" search with your first term:

ex. color OR colour 

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

If it's not at the library

Finding books located in other libraries