Library Tool Box - The Basics - FYS 1399 - 20th Century Novel

Basic Tools

Find Books
Need to find a book? Use our OneSearch Advanced search and limit "Material Type" to BOOKS.
OneSearch
This search tool will look in almost all of the Libraries' collections - books, journals, digital collections, and special collections - in one search. It returns a lot of results, but also has some powerful limiting features to focus your results. Also accessible from the Libraries' Home Page.
The Librarians
Probably your most powerful resource is the librarian who is assigned to work specifically with the folks in your major or with the field you are writing your paper on. All of us are willing to meet one-on-one with you to help you find a good topic and the resources to successfully complete that assignment or paper. That's our job.

Effective Searching

You can search BearCat and the various databases I'm pointing you to most effectively if you do the following:

1. Search for authors last name first, (Joyce, James)

2. Divide your search into three parts:

a) Search for your author as author to find the books s/he wrote
b) Search for your author as subject to find works about your author
c) Search for the specific novel by its title with the word criticism after it (To the Lighthouse criticism)

You can also search for a specifc character or literary theme - especially useful in the databases.

Short Stories: You can search for the name of the short story, but if you don't find anything also search for the name of the collection the short story appeared in or combine the title of the short story and its theme or the name of a character from the story. Use the tips on searching with Boolean operators in the next paragraph to learn how to combine terms for a shorter list of results.

You'll also want to consider combining keywords with Boolean operators (and/or/not) to get just a few really good results rather than lots of results.

AND: both terms need to be in each item in the result list.So if you want to find an article on the theme of Catholocism in Brideshead Revisited, you would use and to get both terms in your results: Brideshead Revisited and Catholic.

OR: either term can be in each item in the result list. If you wanted articles on women or feminine in Brideshead Revisited, you'd write it out like this: Brideshead Revisited AND (women OR feminine)

NOT: the word(s) after the NOT won't be in any of the results. You're tired of looking at articles on the Catholic influence on James Joyce's work so write your search this way: Joyce, James NOT Catholic

Basic Services

Scholarly journals? What's that?
One of the differences in college-level research is that you'll need to find "scholarly" or "peer-reviewed" journal articles. This guide will help you understand what is meant by those terms so you don't turn in the wrong type of article for the task at hand.
If we don't own something you need for a paper . . .
Libraries have a system, called interlibrary loan, to borrow items we don't have from other libraries. It's a free service, but does take some time. This page from our intro to library tutorial give a more complete explanation.

Do we have this book/article/DVD here?

You'll use BearCat to find out if we own a book or a specific journal/magazine and our databases (guides to the articles published in journals, magazines and newspapers) to identify useful sources for assignments and papers. Where do you go from there? The items below link to explanations about how to locate items in the Libraries and how to get what we may not have.

Reading Library of Congress Call Numbers
This chart from the University of North Carolina Libraries is a quick explanation of how to use this finding system to find a specific book on the shelf.
To find where in the BU Libraries a specific call number is located just click on the LOCATION (Moody General; Jones Reference, Texas, etc.) and you'll be taken to a map showing you where the book is in the building or where the building is on campus.
How do I know if you have an article I want?
You're in a database and the article you want isn't listed there. We have many databases and each of them has different content so don't give up. This link explains how to use the BU InfoLinks button to find out if the article is in another one of our databases.

FYS 1399 - 20th Century Novel: Library Tool Box - The Basics

Basic Tools

Effective Searching

Basic Services

Do we have this book/article/DVD here?

University Libraries