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Finding Books and Articles via the Catalog and Articles+
- Use the catalog to conduct known-item searching (when you have a specific source that you'd like to find), e.g. Race and modern architecture : a critical history from the enlightenment to the present / edited by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, Mabel O. Wilson.
- If you don't have a specific work in mind, use the catalog to conduct a keyword search. You can significantly narrow your results by using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and search modifiers (quotation marks, asterisk, parentheses), e.g. "spatial dimension*" AND India; (land OR property) AND India AND caste AND history
- Use the navigation pane at the left of the catalog record to narrow even further by mode of access, format, subject, publication date, etc.
- Be creative and persistent - play with different Boolean searches to narrow and expand your results. When you find one title that is helpful for you, scour the bibliography to lead you to the next helpful resource. This is called chaining, and it's what most scholars do when they conduct research.
- Explore titles by subject heading instead of keyword, e.g. India—Census, Land tenure—India, Urbanization—India, etc.
- Articles+ saves a lot of time by searching several article repositories at once.
- You will find a variety of content types including journal articles, newspaper articles, book chapters, book reviews, etc.
- Use the same techniques above to find what you need for a given topic.