FA 58A: Politics on a Pedestal: Statues; Sculpture; Monuments

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:

"civil war"

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

"civil war"

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

records that include the word civil and the word war but not the phrase "civil war"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

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

sculpt* will search for

sculptor, sculptors, sculpture and sculptures

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. statues OR sculptures OR monuments

• To exclude a word from your search, use the term NOT. For example, you can exclude resources on the Reformation from a search about  iconoclasm:

   iconoclasm NOT reformation

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