How do you make sure that what comes up when you search is relevant to your assignment? How do you find books about the color green and not "green" energy? The following tips can help you find the most useful resources when using the catalog.
Keywords
If searching for just your color, for instance blue, doesn't bring back what you want, try these variations.
- If you don't get enough results, et more general. Trying searching for "colors" or "color in art" and then see if anything that comes up has a section about your specific color.
- If you're getting irrelevant results - for example, too much about the Red Cross instead of the color red, combine your color with terms like colors, color in art, or pigment.
- You might find it easier to combine keywords using Advanced Search, where you can put each word of phrase in a separate search box to be combined. The Searching in the Catalog tutorial can tell you more about using advanced search.
Subject Headings
Subject headings are like keywords but on steroids. Everything you find in the catalog should have at least one subject heading assigned to it.
- These headings act as the official labels or tags to describe what the book is about.
- Searching for subject headings instead of keywords is a much more specific search. It may be helpful to search by subject if you get too many results, or irrelevant ones.
- You may try your color as a subject, or "Color" as a subject.
- You can search by subject by selecting "Subject" from the dropdown menu next to your keyword in the search box.
Where to Look
The Cullom-Davis Library contains a lot of different things, but it also does not contain everything. It's helpful to be able to identify which things we have are most useful to you, and also other places you can look.
- Preschoolers also learn a lot about colors. We carry many books for children. To make sure you're not accidentally getting a children's book, check the Availability of the book you're looking at. If it says Curriculum Materials Center, there's a 99% chance it's a children's book.
- If we don't have enough books or videos or anything available on your topic, try searching in I-Share.
- This will let you search for things in over 80 college and research libraries in Illinois. There is bound to be something out there for you!
- This is also useful if we have a book you want but somebody else has already checked our copy out.
- When you find something in I-Share, you can request it to be sent to the Cullom-Davis Library where you can pick it up using your student ID.
- Requested books take a few days to get here, so make sure you make your requests way before your assignment is due!
- The How to Request Items from Other Libraries tutorial can walk you through this process.
