FA 197A: Studies in Asian Art: Fashion History of China

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

Use Brandeis Library OneSearch to search the online catalog of the Brandeis Library. Choose Library Catalog from the drop-down menu options 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 the Library Catalog 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 the Library Catalog by keyword, and use the Subjects listed in the left margin to find related materials.

• Remember to enclose search phrases in quotes:

"street fashion"

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

"street fashion"

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

records that include the word street and the word fashion but not the phrase "street fashion"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

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

chin* will search for

china and chinese

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. covid OR coronavirus

• 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.