QuickSearch, on the Libraries homepage, is a tool to search across library resources. It searches many, many, but not all, of the Libraries databases. It also searches what used to be the Libraries catalog: books and e-books, music, maps, government documents, and much more.
In a basic search, you type your search into a single search box:
- Quotes to search a phrase: "food insecurity"
- Use the wildcard, an asterisk, to search for forms of a word: child* searches child, child's, children, children's, etc.
- Combine terms with AND, OR (in caps)
-- AND makes your search more focused: "food insecurity" AND child* is more specific than "food insecurity"
-- OR broadens your search: "food insecurity" OR "food security" will retrieve more sources than just "food insecurity".
--- If you use AND, OR in the same search statement, place the ORed terms in parentheses, so that QuickSearch searches those terms together, as a separate element in your search statement.
So in basic search in QuickSearch, this search would read:
("food insecurity" OR "food security") AND child*
On the Libraries homepage, click on Advanced QuickSearch. Advanced Search allows you to search for terms in a specific "field" (for an author's, words in a title, for subject heading), to search specific types of sources, sources published during a certain period of time, etc.
Click here to see an example: books published since 2020 that have the phrase "food insecurity" OR "food security" in the title. (If you use OR to combine terms in QuickSearch, remember to type OR in caps.)
For an author's name, search, in quotes: "last name, first name".
To get a citation for a source, in its record click the citation icon, the quotation mark.
To email a single source, click the email icon. To email a batch of sources, check of the boxes to the left of the sources that interest you, then click ... in the upper right of the page (next to the pushpin icon) and click the email icon.