FYS: Designing Women (2022)

Generating Key Words

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

Topics, names and places are all good key words, so are titles, events or historical periods, genres/styles/other categories, expert terms.

• Who - architects' names, types of architects, groups, architectural firms
• When - era, century, date, other time periods
• Where - city, country, region, continent
• What - profession, product, material, style, movement, purpose

These categories help create different types of searches for context, for example:

• search for modernist women architects (who)
• search for Asian women architects from the 20th century (where + who + when)
• search for German furniture design in the Bauhaus style (where + what)

Add to your list by reading more about your topic, and by looking for:

• related terms (domestic space - household)
• synonyms (woman - female)
• Subject terms in OneSearch and other databases.

Too few results? Search more broadly: 

Try your search using fewer words, or change to a broader category: for example, use the term buildings (broad), instead of just skyscrapers (narrow).

Too many results? Narrow down by adding something:

Try combining  search words or ideas.

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.