ART 1A: Visual Literacy (Taschian, Fall 2024): Search Tips & Tricks

Keywords are the words that describe your topic of research. These can be individual words or a phrase. Keywords can be chosen from the sentence you create to define your research topic. Once you choose the significant words, you can then come up with synonyms, or words with similar meanings. All of these can be keywords to use in forming your search.

Boolean Operators are words that connect search terms or keywords together to broaden or narrow the results retrieved. In research they are often used with the library's databases or the library catalog. 

The three Boolean operators are AND, OR, and NOT.

• AND narrows your search results by limiting your results to those that contain both words connected with AND.
• OR expands your search results by including results that contain one word, the other word, or both words.
• NOT narrows your search results by limiting your results to those that contain the word you designate before NOT, but not the word after NOT.

One way to visualize Boolean Operators is to use a Venn diagram. 

Boolean Modifiers can further expand, refine, and improve a search. Boolean modifiers include quotation marks, the asterisk, *, (also known as truncation searching), and the wildcard.

• Quotation Marks: Create a precise phrase using quotation marks. This technique narrows your search. Use this for common phrases. 

  Less Precise	More Precise
  global AND warming	"global warming"

Note: Most databases recognize quotation marks, but some do not. Pay attention to bolded terms in a result list to determine whether the database found the phrase or searched by individual keyword.

• The asterisk, *, is a technique that tells the database to return results that include all variations of a word based on its root, or the letters before the asterisk. Truncation broadens your search. See the following examples:
  • Searching for child* will return results with the following words:
    • child, childs (which could be a last name), children, childrens, childhood
  • Searching for stat* will return results with the following words:
    • state, states, statute, statutory, statistic, statistics, stats, statistical

Note: Some databases utilize different truncation symbols. Always check a database’s HELP section for more information.

• Wildcards: Similar to truncation, but replace only one letter and can be used within a word to account for variations in spelling. This technique broadens your search. See the following examples:
  • Searching for wom!n will return results such as woman, women, womyn
  • Searching for colo?r will return results such as color, colour

Note: Some databases utilize different wildcard symbols. Always check a database’s HELP section for more information.

• Parentheses or brackets are used to encapsulate OR statements. The parentheses tells the database how you want to group your search terms, which is essentially what you are doing when you link synonyms with OR on one line of advanced search: An example of this is: (elderly OR aged OR senior citizen).

Note: in the video below, use of parentheses is compared to BEDMAS, which is more commonly referred to as PEMDAS (Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction) in the United States.

• Names and other proper nouns
• Titles
• Organizations
• Authors
• People
• Places
• Ethnicities
• Geographic regions
• Historical periods
• Specific policies
• Specific legislation or laws
• Events
• Professions
• Theories
• Issues
• Types of information (e.g., oral history, statistics)
• Anything and more
• THINK CREATIVELY

Although it was developed to organize materials housed at the Library of Congress, the Library of Congress Classification system (LCC) is widely used in academic libraries around the world. The LCC system begins with 21 categories, each identified by a letter of the alphabet. Most of the categories include subcatagories that are identified by 1 or 2 more letters. For example N contains Fine Arts; ND is Painting, a topic in fine art. 

Individual topics are delineated by place, time period, etc. using numbers. For example, iin ND673 you'll find books on painter Peter Paul Rubens who lived from 1577-1640.  A call number may have up to 4 digits (1-9999) in the main part, and then if necessary, decimal places that may have only numbers or both a letter and numbers.