FYS: Imagined Cities from Plato to Pratchett

OneSearch: Books, Articles, Films & More

How To Search

AND, OR, & NOT (also known as "Boolean operators") help you combine search words, to find what you are looking for. Watch this video to find out how it works:

Adapted from the materials created by The University of Auckland Library, NZ. This video is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license.

Smart Searching Tips

Create a list of key words, and try different key words in your searches:

Who, what, where, when....topics, names and places are all good key words, so are titles, events or historical periods, genres/styles/other categories, expert terms.
Add to your list by looking for:

• Subject terms in OneSearch and other databases.
• related terms (producer - filmmaker)
• synonyms (woman - female)

No results? Search more broadly: 

Try your search using fewer terms, or change to broader terms: for example, use the term librarianship (broad), instead of just Association of College and Research Libraries (narrow).

Too many results? Narrow down by adding something:

Try combining  search words, using "and" in between: celebrity AND media

Search Tools

Combine your terms using "AND":

libraries AND history AND Education

Use the *  (asterisk) wildcard, to search several terms at once.

act* = acting, actor, actors, etc.
 

Use quotation marks to enclose a phrase:

"social media"