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MUSC 220: Medieval Music: Women, and Performance (HC)

Spring 2022 Ruisard

Search Tips

Boolean operators: 

AND, OR, NOT allow you to limit or expand searches depending on your needs.


AND

Machaut AND ars nova

   


OR

lai OR lay

   


NOT

Earp (Lawrence Earp, Machaut scholar) NOT Wyatt (notorious lawman)

Phrase searching:

Use " " to group a specific phrase of words together. An important strategy to employ when searching phrasal concepts or conducting known-item searches for titles.

Nested Searching:

When pairing two or more keywords with another keyword, it is helfpul to "nest" the former terms within a larger Boolean search.

  • For example, Chopin AND (Sand OR Dupin OR Dudevant) will return results for Chopin and his partner, Amandine Aurore Lucille Dupin (aka, George Sand and the Baroness Dudevant).
  • Many catalogs or databases will have an "advanced search" option, which provides multiple search bars to facilitate nested searching.

 

Truncation and Wildcards:

Most catalogs and databases enable users to search variations of keywords by using truncation (*) or wildcard (e.g., ?, $, !) symbols.

  • For example, one could search for romantic* to find romantic, romanticism, romanticize, and so on.
  • Wildcard searching works similarly: a search for mu??k would return musik (Ger), muzak, and so on.
  • Combining the two, viol?n* would return violin, violinist, violon (Fr), violoniste (Fr), violino (It), and so on.