HIST 1320 U.S. History from 1877, Booker

So, our databases and our catalog are picky about what you type in.  What can you do? 

Truncation allows you to use a symbol, for our catalog and most databases it is an asterisk *, to search for various endings of words.  So, a search for climat* will find climate, climatology, climates, climatic, etc.

Boolean words allow you to either reduce the number of results or expand it by either requiring certain keywords, excluding certain keywords, or allowing for alternative words.  In library databases, these are AND, OR, and NOT.  You can usually just type these in, but many of our databases also have drop-down menu options. 

Using the word AND means that both search terms will be required to be in the results.  Most of our databases do this automatically. 

For example, 1 would be all articles about "Climate Change" and 2 would be all of the articles about the Pacific.  The yellow area in the middle would be the results that have both search terms.

The Boolean word OR lets you search for synonyms or related terms at the same time, which is very helpful!  Google may do this automatically, but our databases do not.  So, you can search for "Climate Change" OR "Global Warming" and get more results.

Sometimes it is helpful to exclude certain words if you are getting a lot of results that aren't about your topic.  For example, if you did a search for "Climate Change" AND Pacific, but you are getting a lot of results about the Pacific Northwest, you can say NOT northwest.