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“Brandeis

FA 193A Politics of Urban Space: Rethinking Urban Contestation and Inclusion

Course guide created by Lisa Zeidenberg, Creative Arts Librarian, for Professor Muna Guvenc Ospina Leon

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 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 identify relevant materials. Clicking on the subject headings listed under individual item records will expand your results to the entire catalog. 

Search tips

  • Remember to enclose search phrases in quotes:

"urban space"

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

"urban space"

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

records that include the word urban and the word space but not the phrase "urban space"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

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

urban* will search for

urban, urbanism, and urbanization

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. "urban renewal" or "gentrification"

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

If it's not at the library