FYWB 1109: First-Year Writing, Wild Tongues (Benjamin)

Tips for entering searches:

• When entering search terms, use the * symbol to search for variant spellings and endings. The asterisk stands in for one or more letters. For instance, theat* searches theatre, theater, theatrical, etc. 
• If you're searching terms together as a phrase, surround them with quotes. For instance, "performance art."
• Use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to search terms together. Find more on Boolean logic here.

Tips for exploring results:

• Use the facet boxes on the left hand side of the results page. These will help you narrow down results by format, publication date, author/creator name, location, language, subject heading, and more. 
• When exploring an individual record for an item, like a book or film, reaqd the table of contents and summary (if available) to help you determine the relevance of a source to your research goals. 
• Use linked subject headings in item records to try out new searches. 

Beyond Barnard and Columbia

• Use Borrow Direct or Interlibrary Loan to request books that aren't currently available at the Barnard and Columbia libraries. 
• Worldcat searches libraries worldwide. Using Worldcat, you can quickly find out if an item might be available at the NYPL, or another academic library (if the latter, try Borrow Direct or ILL to request from off campus).
• The NYPL catalog searches the circulating and non-circulating research collections at the New York Public Library.
• The Archives and Manuscripts search page allows for exploration of special collections.

CLIO Catalog

CLIO is the online catalog to Columbia University Libraries (including Barnard), but excluding Teacher's College and the Law Library who maintain their own catalogs. CLIO contains over 7 million records for books, online resources, journals & newspapers, conference proceedings, sound recordings & scores, videos, archival collections & oral history transcripts, online databases, maps & images, and more!

CLIO Search Tips:

• Use the Catalog Search to find books, journal and newspaper titles, media materials, musical scores, archival collections and databases (but not articles within databases). You can also find maps and atlases.
• Article Search allows you to search articles indexed in all of Columbia's databases
• Search for specific e-journal titles using the E-journal Title search
• Use the link to Borrow Direct or Interlibrary Loan when the book or media item is checked out.

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*)