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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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