English 130 Library Tutorial Module 4: Search Tools and Information Resources (Part 2)

Book Searching

Book searching is a little different from article searching. Because books are longer than articles, they often cover broader or more general topics, provide more depth by analyzing several works within a specific theme, time period, or genre, or look at a phenomenon across multiple time periods.

A lot of good literary scholarship is published in books rather than articles, so knowing how to find books can be really important! Please note that when you are using a book, you do not need to read the entire thing; just finding a relevant chapter or section is often perfectly sufficient. Most scholarly books are written so that their chapters can stand alone.

Right now, only e-books are available, but fortunately, the library has a lot of those, too.

OneSearch

OneSearch is a tool that searches across most of the resources you can access through the library. Sometimes this is great – you get a lot of resources with a simple search! – and sometimes it’s frustrating – you get a huge jumble of unrelated resources.

Since books are longer than articles, they are often more general. This means that the keywords you’d use to search for articles might not work as well for books, and vice versa. So when I’m searching in OneSearch, I like to limit my search to just books.

In literary criticism, books (unlike articles) are usually about authors rather than literary works, so in most cases, it’s best to search for the author rather than the title of the work. For this example, let’s search for James Baldwin.

So if I were looking for criticism on James Baldwin’s work, I could just search for his name. Since the print collection is closed right now, I’ll limit to only those items available online. I have included a screenshot of what that limiter looks like. Note it is only available after I search, and it’s located to the right of the search results.

Now, Baldwin is a fairly prolific writer, so I might find it helpful to add a search for the title work in question. Let’s say I’m thinking of If Beale Street Could Talk. By adding Beale Street to my search, I now have a very short list of books. However, I found two that have full chapters dedicated to Baldwin’s novel.

Is there anything else here on Beale Street? There might be. If, for instance, I’m interested in the portrayal of love in that novel, I might try a search like this: “James Baldwin” and love. This is a different set of results, but it too might include relevant results.

Exercise

Search for books about your author in OneSearch.

How many came up?

If there are a lot, you might want to add a keyword to your search.

If there are books on your author, identify a specific chapter that might address the themes you’re writing about.  Cite it below.

If there aren’t useful books on your author, think about some context in which your author exists -- genre, historical period, etc. Search for that context.

List one book you see that might be of interest for your writing: