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Research at the Center
How Do I Find Rare Books?
Advanced Searching: Combining Keywords
Your Religious Studies professor has asked you to find
three primary sources for a paper you are writing on the development
of religious education for children in Britain through the 19th century.
You can use the "Advanced Keyword" module of the catalog to
narrow your search in many ways. In this case, we will take several
of the keywords for concepts in your paper topic and alter them for
maximum searching capability.
A review
of the Library Catalog
Searching Tips may be helpful for advanced searching.
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In
the first drop-down menu on the Advanced Search page, select "Anywhere."
This option searches your provided term in the author, title,
subject, and other fields of the online records, and returns anything
that matches this term.
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Type
child* into the first search box. By adding the asterisk
as a wildcard symbol, both child and children will
be searched for in the online records.
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From
the next drop-down menu, select "Anywhere" again, then
type education in the search box.
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From
the third drop-down menu, select "Publication Place."
If you are concentrating on religious education specifically in
Britain, it would be best to start with London as a place of publication,
although repeating the search with other cities, such as Edinburgh,
may return other books useful for your topic. Type london
into the search box.
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In
the "Limits" section of the search page, select Special
Collections.
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In
the "User defined limits" section of the search page,
select Year of Publication from the drop-down menu.
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Type
18**. If you are specifically interested in the development
of 19th century religious education, using these wildcard asterisks
will ensure that a broader range of dates (1800-1899) will
be searched.
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Click
on the Go button.
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Around
20 items are returned, representing a broad range of titles. Some are
books written to educate children on religious themes; some are written
by the educators themselves for adult audiences. With these titles,
you will find a variety of approaches to your topic.
Going Further:
Subject Searching
If you find you want to dig even deeper into these results, subject
searching is a great way to refine your search for more material on
a certain subject.
The following
example uses the results
returned from the religious education example used above in the Advanced
Keyword section.
- Click on the title "The
parent's offering to a good child...", toward the bottom of
the page. In the record for this title, you will notice that Moral
Education is listed under "Subject(s)". Several of the
other titles in the results also have this listed as a subject. Searching
by this subject may turn up new and relevant results.
- Go to the Advanced
Keyword screen in the online catalog.
- Select "Publication
Place" from a drop-down menu, then type london.
- Type moral education
into the blank box next to "Subject".
- Select Special Collections
in the "Limits" section.
- In the "User defined
limits" section, select "Year of Publication" from the
drop-down menu and type 18**in the blank box.
- Click on the Go button.
- See the results
of this search.
Some of the
titles returned here were in our original Advanced Keyword search above;
however, there are several other titles showing here that were not
in the first results. In the first search, we searched for variants
of "child" (child*), plus the word "education."
The new titles do not show the words "child" or "children"
in their catalog records; instead, "the young" or "juvenile"
is used along with "education." Subject headings bring
together works on a common theme regardless of the titles. These new
titles are likely to provide a broader perspective of British religious
education in the 19th century.
There are several
other subjects shown in those records which might be relevant to this
topic; for example, Christian education of children. Repeat the
subject search above with other subject headings to find even more titles
which might be related to your topic.
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