Brandon University - John E. Robbins Library - Basic Principles of Searching

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Basic Principles of Searching

1. Don't make your search too broad: If you search a library catalog or database for a word like "education", you're going to get a lot of results. Most of these results will be no use to you.
2. Don't make your search too narrow: If you search a library catalog or database for "labour leaders in Winnipeg in the 1920s", you probably won't get any results. Try "labour history and Manitoba", and if that doesn't get any results try "labour leaders and Canada".
3. "And", "Or" & "Not" are valuable tools: "Bees and flowers" retrieves all the records that have both the words "bees" and "flowers". "Bees or flowers" retrieves all the records that have either the word "bees" or the word "flowers" in them. "Bees not flowers" retrieves all the records that have the word "bees" in them but not the records that have the word "flowers" in them. Important point: the BU library catalog assumes that an "and" is between each word in the search, so "Manitoba labour history" will be searched as "Manitoba and labour and history". Not all databases do this, so if you're unsure about how a database works, use "and" in the search.
4. Spelling counts: A search for "bee" will not find records with the word "bees". A search for "labor" will not find records with the word "labour". To cover all the possibilities, you can either connect all the variations with an "or" ("bee or bees") or you can use a wildcard symbol like "*" or "?". In the BU library catalog, "bee*" will find any words starting with "bee" (bee, bees, Beethoven) and "lab?r" will find any words starting with "lab" and ending with "r" (labor, labour Labrador). Different databases use different wildcard symbols, so it pays to look at the help screens for a database. One bright spot: most databases aren't sensitive to capital letters, so "president" and "President" will give the same results.
5. You will get better results if you use the library catalog or database's preferred terms: Many library catalogs and databases try to simplify the searching by using standardized terms to describe the books or articles. The BU library catalog uses Library of Congress Subject Headings. ERIC uses its own preferred terms, available in the ERIC thesaurus. Searches that use those subject headings will do better than those that don't.
6. If you need more help, come to the library information desk: We're open from 10:00 to 4:00, Monday to Friday.

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Brandon University

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Brandon Manitoba, R7A 6A9
Phone: 727-9646 Fax: 726-1072

Last updated December 13, 2010.