Expos 20: The Art and Science of Learning

HOLLIS contains records of every item cataloged within every Harvard Library in addition to external records of journal, newspaper, and magazine articles, as well as book citations. Some of the latter items we own; others we don't, but if you find something in HOLLIS, the Library can almost always get it into your hands quickly. Think of HOLLIS as a discovery platform -- a way to search panoramically across subjects, languages, time periods, and information formats.

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

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Formulate your search syntax.

EXACT PHRASE

Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase instead of separate words. Example: "the color purple"

AND, OR, NOT

Boolean operators must be in all caps. Examples: NSA OR "National Security Agency" ; cellular NOT phone

TRUNCATION

An asterisk (*) finds all word endings. Example: child* finds child, children, childhood, childproof, childbirth ...

GROUPING

Use parentheses to group synonyms and do multiple searches at a time. Example: ("Affordable care act" OR Obamacare) AND "birth control"

Refine your search terms.

MORE OR LESS

Add or remove search terms to adjust your results.

UNIQUENESS

Use words that are likely to show up in the material you want and unlikely to show up elsewhere.

CONNECT TO A SUBJECT

Specify the research areas connected to your topic. Examples: "civil war" AND education ; "civil war" AND medical

FOCUS

Narrow down to a:

• GENRE. Examples: AND biography ; AND history ; AND criticism
• FORMAT. Examples: AND statistics ; AND interviews ; AND correspondence
• REGION. Examples: AND Latin America ; AND Middle East
• TIME PERIOD. Examples: AND 18th century ; AND medieval

OTHER TERMS

Explore your results for more search term ideas; pay attention to titles, abstracts, and subject headings.

FOR SECONDARY SOURCES
 

• 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, play, 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 often help you surface works that identify the "stakes" of a particular argument, action, phenomenon, etc.
• theory or theoretical or philosophy or philosophical might help you find works in larger contexts or examined via a "lens" of some kind.

FOR PRIMARY SOURCES
 

• narrative* or diaries or case study or interview* or memoir or even the phrase "lived experiences" might angle topics more specifically toward studies of social relationships, observations of behavior, personal reflections, explanations or first hand "testimony" of some kind.
• For visual materials, try subject terms like posters or portraits or photographs or advertising.
• qualitative is one way social science researchers describe their non-numeric data collection methods -- and "qualitative" generally means interviews, focus groups, observed behavior of some kind.
• Anthropologists sometimes call their observational methods ethnography, so you might try that word (or ethnograph*)  as well.
• proverbs is a useful subject term if you want to surface the normative wisdom or virtue ethics of a particular society; for example: proverbs, American.
• interview is also a great word to use in newspaper searching, when you're looking for primary evidence in the form of personal stories or first-hand accounts and testimonies.
• While a biography is technically a secondary source (a second-hand account of a life), biographies are built out of a whole host of primary sources: documents, papers, interviews, correspondence, etc.  So you might find your primary sources, sometimes, by "reverse engineering" from a secondary source.

While the amount of information HOLLIS contains is fabulous, you can sometimes find yourself overwhelmed by either the numbers or types of results your keyword search returns.

When that happens, try one of these easy techniques to bring your results into sharper focus:

Limit your search results set to only the items listed as BOOKS or BOOK CHAPTERS

• Your numbers will immediately get smaller. And with book chapters, you may discover a great resource that you might not have seen if you had relied solely on the titles of books.

 Limit your 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 your results set. 

Think about limiting your results to publications from the last 5, 10, 15, or 20 years.

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