FA 155A: Impressionism: Avant-Garde Rebellion in Context

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.

• Subject analysis of topic for effective keyword searching: who--what--where--when

  • To find useful books (or articles) that focus on topics beyond a particular artist yet include this artist within the theme of the book, an analysis of terms associated with your artist can provide powerful keywords for searching.

  • This analysis should include (as appropriate): a particular group that included the artist (school, race, gender, etc.), the particular medium (painting, sculpture, etc.), the geographical location and nationality (from broad, such as continent, to narrow, such as city), and time period (both century and descriptive name).

• Remember to enclose search phrases in quotes:

"monet in normandy"

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

"monet in normandy"

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

records that include the word "monet" and the word "normandy" but not the phrase "monet in normandy"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

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

exhibit* will search for

exhibit, exhibits, exhibition and exhibitions

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:

monet exhibition*

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

Monet, Claude, 1840-1926 -- Exhibitions.

• 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.