FYS 1399 Terrorism & Political Violence: Finding Books

The OneSearch tab on the Libraries homepage is the tool to use to search through most of Baylor Libraries' content regardless of what type of material it is - print, electronic, or media.  Your result list will include books, journal articles (scholarly and popular), government documents,  our online reference collections (like Literati), Baylor Libraries Digital content, library guides (like this one), music and films, and suggestions to subject-specific databases you might want to use to get very specific sources for your paper or research.

The results are returned ranked by relevancy - based on how often the terms  you searched for are included in the specific item.  You can resort the order by date (either oldest to newest or vice versa), but for most searches relevancy will be your best option.

OneSearch allows you to limit your result list by several categories. What options will appear in the Refine your search box will vary depending on the search results.  Some tips on using these categories effectively for first year course work:

• Content Type check the boxes for types you want included so check only Books/eBooks, Journal Articles, and Reference.  Book reviews and Dissertation/Thesis are two content types that won't help you much for this class.
• Subject Terms is also and include the checked items so scan this list and if you want to search for, say, "history" in one search then go back and search "political science" in a second search, that would be a good use of your time.
• Library Location for this class, I suggest you limit to the Central Libraries (Moody & Jones) as this library has more books you can check out and longer hours than our special libraries.
• Language if you read only English, choose this to exclude other langages from the result list

If you are searching a very recent topic or if you are looking for how an event was reported at the time it happened you'll probably want to use the date slider under Publication Date to the 2 - 3 months around the date of the event.  So for current events surrounding September 11th, 2001 you would search for September - October of 2001.

BearCat has some features that are useful for finding specifc types of materials you need.  Because library records are organized into fields (author, title, subject, etc.) you can use this information to quickly find a particular type of material - an encyclopedia, a map or atlas, and primary sources like letters, diaries and the like.

To do this search from the keyword search page of BearCat  and type in the general subject you are looking for - terrorism - followed by d:encyclopedias.  Note that there is no space between the colon (:) and the word that follows.  The d: tells BearCat to return items where the word that follows is only in the subject heading of the library record (BearCat assumes you want both/all terms you put in and automatically connects them with and).

The one thing you need to be sure of is that the word following the d: is an "official" subject term in the controlled vocabulary we use for BearCat.  For this class, some of the useful "official" subject headings include:

• encyclopedias
• atlases
• maps
• sources (for first-hand works and records on a topic)