Expos 20 | More than A Game

HOLLIS is the Harvard Library’s main search tool. It enables you to search across subjects, languages, time periods, and information formats.

The Catalog & Articles search searches the catalog plus billions of citations. Or you can choose Library Catalog from the drop-down to limit to Harvard collections.

Choose Catalog & Articles if:

• You want to explore the broadest variety of sources
• Your topic is very interdisciplinary or very current
• You already have the title of an article you want

Choose Library Catalog if:

• You want book-length treatments of a topic
• You’re looking for Harvard collections in particular
• You need reliable filters for authors and subjects

Creating search strings with some of the techniques below can help you get better results up front. 

While searching HOLLIS you may sometimes find yourself overwhelmed by either the numbers or types of results your search returns. If this happens, try one of these easy tricks to bring your results into sharper focus:

1. Limit your "Catalog & Articles" search results set to items that are identified as PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES.

• You'll eliminate newspaper and magazine materials as well as books, of course, but you'll also raise the visibility of scholarly journal articles in what displays. 

2. Limit your results to publications from the last 5, 10, 15, or 20 years.

• You'll get a snapshot of the most recent research trends and scholarly approaches in a field (or around a particular issue).

3. Add a keyword (or keywords) to indicate what you're after

• Examples: 
  • handbook or companion or encyclopedia are common words to help identify good background or overview sources.
  • criticism or interpretation are words that will bring up secondary source studies of a book, film, artwork, musical piece, artist or writer, etc. 
  • history is a way to get at full-length studies not just of countries or events, but also of ideas and concepts and broad subjects. 
  • debate or controversy (or controvers* to pick up variants), or contested or disputed are words that will often help you surface works that identify the "stakes" of a particular argument, action, conclusion, etc. 
  • theory or theoretical or philosophy or philosophical are terms that sometimes help surface works in larger contexts or examined via a "lens" of some kind. 

Scan and Deliver

When an article you find in HOLLIS is not owned at Harvard, or is available in a printed journal volume but not online, you can ask us to make a PDF for you through a service called Scan and Deliver. This service is also an option if you want up to two chapters of any Harvard-owned book digitized for your use.

If a book you need is not owned by the Harvard Library or is not currently available from the Library, use Interlibrary Loan/Borrow Direct to request a copy from another library.