Research Guides: CITY 217: Research Methods: Library Basics

Locating Books in Tri-Co and Beyond

Need help navigating Tripod, the library catalog, and the libraries? Go to the Library Basics Research Guide

Borrowing Beyond TriCo: ILL/E-Z Borrow
Need a look that isn't in the TriCo?
Google Scholar
Google Scholar will find some of the same items Proquest will, but includes scholarly material not published in journals (blog posts, working papers, etc.)

WorldCat
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A catalog of the holdings of books, journals, and other materials held by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) member libraries. Includes manuscripts, maps, films and sound recordings. Covers works published before 1,000 BC-present.

Search Tips

Deconstruct your topic or research question to select keywords, phrases or concepts. Think of synonyms of these terms as well.

Boolean Operator: AND, OR, NOT, NEAR

Use AND to connect your main concepts
Use OR between related concepts
Use NEAR to find two concepts that are in proximity to each other (an option on JSTOR)
Put quotations around a term to search for that exact phrase e.g. "migration policy"

Use nesting by adding parentheses around your OR phrases and quotes around multi-term phrases

Examples: (urban OR city) AND plan*

(city AND planning) AND (America)

America* AND (“urban layout” OR “city planning”)

Truncate your word to get more results and alternative endings by adding an asterix * to the word

•creat* = creature, creation, create, creating, creator, etc.

Use a Wildcard (?) for alternative spellings

•wom?n = woman or women

•hono?r = honor or honour

•?nquiry = inquiry or enquiry

Oxford Reference
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Bringing together 2 million digitized entries across Oxford University Press’s Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopedias, Oxford Reference is the premier online reference product, spanning 25 different subject areas with coverage from 2002 to the present.

Encyclopedia of urban studies (Online : Gale)
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Covers all aspects of cities, their suburbs, and other urban areas. Includes urban economics, urban planning, urban architecture, urban ecology, urban transportation systems, urban politics, and urban social relations.

Brill's Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World
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Traces the history and cultural influence of Neo-Latin, the form of Latin that originated in the Italian Renaissance and persists to the modern era. Featuring original contributions by distinguished international scholars, this reference work explores aspecst of the civilized world from literature and law to philosophy and the sciences.