Hi, my name is Amy Bush and I'm one of the librarians here at
Yuba College.
Today I'm going to talk to you about searching the library's
resources using boolean operators, keywords, and
phrases.
Boolean operators are used to connect your keywords.
So when you're searching the more key terms that you connect
with and you're going to start narrowing your results because
it tells the system that both A&B have to be present in
that record for it to show up.
You can see my example to the right of the image.
I used music and social change.
Notice I capitalized AND because it's a boolean operator and you
capitalize it to tell the system that it's a connector and not a
search term.
So you always want to capitalize AND or not when you're
connecting keywords.
So here I'm looking for the term music and social change.
They both have to be present in the record for that result to
come up.
Now let's look at OR.
The more terms that you connect with, or the broader and the
more results are going to show up.
So if you look to the right of the image, I used rhetoric or
rhetorical.
Now that's telling the system that either one of those terms
can be present and it would be OK You use or.
When you're thinking about either synonymous terms or
different ways an author might talk about the same subject, you
can use or MIT with many, many, many different terms to broaden
and get more results.
You only use the boolean operator, not when you're trying
to exclude something that's irrelevant.
So look here to the right of the image.
I used teen or adolescent, not adult.
When I first started searching.
I would just search teen or adolescent and then start
looking through my results.
If I find a term that keeps coming up that's irrelevant in
multiple records, then I would go back and add NOT to whatever
that term is.
So in this case I added not adult.
And you have to make sure that not is at the end of your search
string, because anything after the word not will be excluded
from the results.
So you do need to kind of be careful of that.
So here's how you search the library's online resources with
keywords.
Let's say your research question is how can music be used to
impact social change?
Unlike Google where you would just type out you know your
whole research question, you actually have to extrapolate or
take out the keywords.
So your keywords in this research question are music and
social change, so take a look here.
Next to keyword searching, I used music.
I joined it with and capitalized Social Change or Influence.
So I added influence because I was thinking about, well, how
might an author talk about this topic?
He might talk about how music influences society in a positive
manner, right?
So if you can think of different terms that authors might use
talking about the same thing you want to join them with or so
Music and social change or influence would be a good way to
search for something like that.
When you phrase search, you put quotation marks around your
phrase.
So here in this example I use quotation marks around social
change.
That tells the system that those words have to be in that order
and right next to each other.
It actually can really narrow or eliminate things, so you kind of
have to be careful with that as well.
And wild card searching is when you put an* either in the middle
of a word, or at the end of a word, or sometimes even at the
beginning of a word, that* tells the system that in that spot it
can have alternate spelling.
So with the* at the end of rhetoric like this, that's
telling the system that it can have alternate endings to
include things like rhetoric, rhetorical, and so on.
So let's take a look at what this would look like in the
Library's One search.
You could just type out your keywords with boolean operators
here.
I personally like to use the advanced search because it gives
you multiple search search bars.
So let's do music.
Here is your boolean operator and you can choose I'm going to
do and the music and let's do Rick.
Now let's do social change.
OK, click enter and now it's searching it.
And then here are the results.
Now you have tons of results, but this is how you would do it.
I did music and social change and then here are my results.
So if you say clicked into this record, you click into the title
and then you can look at the description.
Now here is the description and you can see music is mentioned.
Social issues are mentioned.
OK it might be relevant, it might not.
Be sure to read the description before you just jump into
thinking this is the best source for you and then you can access
the full text here under View online.
I hope this has been helpful.
If you have any questions you can contact the librarian and we
are always happy to help.
Thanks.