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“Brandeis

CAST 110B: Dance and Migration

Course Guide created by Lisa Zeidenberg, Creative Arts Librarian, for Dr. Toni Shapiro-Phim. Librarian Maric Kramer graciously contributed much of this content.

Boolean Logic

OneSearch

  • Use Advanced Search to locate items by title or author that you already know.
  • Use Simple Search (default) to discover potentially useful material, combining keywords or subject terms. OneSearch also lets you explore your subject -- use the headings in the left margin to narrow your search according to specific criteria.

Search Tips

  • Remember to enclose search phrases in quotes:

"trail of tears"

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

"trail of tears"

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

records that include the word trail and the word of and the word tears but not the phrase "trail of tears"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

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

afr* will search for

Afro-, Africa, and Africans

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. women OR female

  • To exclude a word from your search, use the term NOT. For example, you can exclude bird migration from a migration search:

   migration NOT birds

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