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HIST 100-01: Africa as an Idea (Spring 2023)

How to find Books & Chapters

To find books and chapter, use the library catalog to explore the WM Libraries' excellent collection.

Start with a basic keyword search, then refine your keywords as you go. For example, ff you were interested in depictions of Africa in American films, you might try africa AND depictions AND "american film". After your first search, limit to books, ebooks, and chapters. Pay attention to subject headings, too, and you'll see the language catalogers use for this topic. In this case, you'd want to try Africa and "In motion pictures" as keywords together.

For your midterm assignment, you'd try "Black Panther" (in quotes) and limit to books, ebooks, and chapters. 
A lot of results will be about the comic, so you may want to add AND film  or  AND "motion pictures"

Search

Important notes:

  • Don't forget to narrow the search to books, ebooks, chapters
  • Pay attention to subject headings
  • Read the catalog record for a sense of the work's topic and scope
  • Be Sure to use Boolean

Boolean (The Most Important Thing to Know About Databases!)

Be sure to use Caps for AND, OR, NOT when searching.

AND - searches for books and articles containing both terms. Example: Wakandan AND film

OR - searches for one of the words. Example: Film OR movie

NOT - exclude a term. Example:  Film NOT comic

Parenthetical notes () - excellent for OR or NOT searches. Like a math equation, the database will do this part first.
Example: (Film OR "Motion Picture") AND "Black Panther" = search for Black Panther film or Black Panther movie.
Example: ("Black Panther"  NOT "the Black Panthers" ) AND "Motion Picture" = search for motion pictures about Black Panther, not the Black Panthers.

Quotation Marks ""- Links words together in the search. Works best for phrases or proper names.
Example: "black panther"
Example: "motion picture"
Warning: You might exclude results. A search for "depiction of Africa" will exclude all results for "depictions of Africa"

Asterisk * - Allows you to search several word endings at once, without using OR.
Example: Africa* will cover Africa, African, Africans, Africana 
Example: film* will cover film, films
Warning: You may get unexpected results. Brit* will also yield Brittany, Britons, and Britches. Virginia* will bring up articles on the Didelphis virginiana (Virginia opossum)