FA/NEJS 43A Middle Eastern Cities: Navigating the Transition from Empires to Nation-States and the Globalized World

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. 

• Remember to enclose search phrases in quotes:

"middle east"

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

"middle east"

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

records that include the word middle and the word east but not the phrase "middle east"

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. film or cinema

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

• Is the item you want checked out by someone else? Ask for a recall.
• In a hurry? Get a Boston Library Consortium (BLC) card and borrow the item from a nearby academic library - use WorldCat to find which libraries own the item.
• Have a little more time? Request the item from another library through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).