URBS 3440: Shrinking Cities

• If you know exactly what book (journal, video, etc.) you are looking for, you can search by Title, Author, ISBN, etc.
• To find items about a specific topic, first try a keyword search in All Fields.
  • Use "quotation marks" to search for an exact phrase: "St. Louis" 
  • Use * for truncation (to find variant spellings and endings of a word): wom*n will find woman, women, womyn; activis* will find activism, activist, activists, etc.
  • For more complex search, use AND and OR:
    • AND finds records which have all the search terms you entered.
    • OR finds records which have one of the search terms you entered, as well as records which have more than one of the terms. OR finds MORE.
  • ​Use parentheses to group terms:  "St. Louis" AND (black OR "African American") AND ("oral history" OR interview*)
• Subject headings: If you find a book that's relevant, look at its subject headings in CLIO and click through to find more related works.

Boolean searching is based on an algebraic system of logic formulated by George Boole, a 19th century English mathematician.

In a Boolean keyword search, the terms are combined by the operators AND, OR and NOT to narrow or broaden the search (in CLIO, Ovid, and some other databases, you DO have to enter them in capitals).  This type of search is possible in most library catalogs and databases, but Google and other Web search engines do not carry out OR and NOT searches properly.

These Venn diagrams help to visualize the meaning of AND, OR and NOT; the colored area indicates the items that will be retrieved in each case.

AND

The operator AND narrows the search by instructing the search engine to search for all the records containing the first keyword, then for all the records containing the second keyword, and show only those records that contain both.

OR

The operator OR broadens the search to include records containing either keyword, or both.
The OR search is particularly useful when there are several common synonyms for a concept, or variant spellings of a word.

Examples using OR:
medieval OR "middle ages"
"heart attack" OR "myocardial infarction"
vergil OR virgil   

NOT

Combining search terms with the NOT operator narrows the search by excluding unwanted terms.

Examples using combinations of the three operators:
puritans AND women AND (massachusetts OR connecticut OR "rhode island" OR "new hampshire")
(adolescen* OR teen*) AND (cigarettes OR smok*)
reagan AND "star wars" NOT (movie OR film OR cinema OR "motion picture")
"zora neale hurston" AND (correspondence OR letter* OR diar* OR autobiograph* OR memoir*)