[FAS] GEN ED 1186: The Age of Anxiety

Make it a habit to Sign In to HOLLIS every time you open it!

This will let you see the entire catalog, make it easier to request items, and allow you to pin items for later use. 

Now that you are signed in, start searching. If you have a topic or individual you are looking for, enter that in the search bar and see what you get!

Our two examples are Nella Larsen, a writer from the Harlem Renaissance, and artificial intelligence.

Both of those searches give A LOT of results! Almost 10,000 for the author search and over 8 million for artificial intelligence. And the records already tell us a few things.

We can see what type of item is listed, whether a book, journal, or article, for example (red arrows).

We can tell if there is online access to the item (green arrow).

Some things have print and online access, like the second result in the Nella Larsen search (purple circle).

But that is A LOT of results to sort through. Let's make it easier!

You can use the words AND, OR, and NOT to narrow your search.

You need to enter these search operators as all capital letters or HOLLIS will ignore them. 

In the author search example, let's say we don't want anything about Larsen's most famous work, Passing. Our search would look like this:

Using NOT Passing reduces my search by 4,000 items!

There are other ways to refine your results. Along the right side of HOLLIS are filters. You can filter by creation date, resource type, library collection, and many others.

You can also exclude a filter by clicking at the end of the word (a red box will appear - click it).

For the artificial intelligence search, let's filter to the last three years, no government records or datasets, and only peer-reviewed articles. 

Another thing to know about HOLLIS is that it doesn't exactly work like Google or give the best results based on natural speech. 

HOLLIS is organized by the Library of Congress Subject Headings. What does that mean? When you find an item you are interested in, click on the title, then look at the Subjects list. That will give you hints as to the search terms that may get you great results. You can also combine them!

Here is a selected article from our filtered artificial intelligence search:

Now that you are finding great results, how can you keep track of them?

HOLLIS gives you lots of options, beyond having a bunch of open tabs! Remember how we signed in at the beginning of our session? We can Pin resources by simply clicking the Pin icon for the record (yellow arrows). We can then access our pins later or the next time we sign in by clicking the Pin by our name (green arrow). 

You can also export to a variety of citation managers or file types:

Online resources should be immediately available to you, in most cases, since you signed in! But what about print?

Print materials will typically give you their exact location:

But you'll want to know if the book is available. If you want Widener's copy, you would scroll down in the record and see this:

From here, you can see that it is available for checkout (green arrow). You can even request that it be pulled for you and sent to the library of your choice for pickup (red arrow). 

But what if something you want is already checked out? You signed in, remember, don't worry about it! You can request items through Interlibrary Loan, where we borrow it from a library outside of Harvard for you (red arrow below). Also, if you only need one chapter, you can request that a pdf of that chapter be emailed to you (yellow arrow below).

What is offsite storage? Harvard Library has so many resources, the libraries can't hold them all! Just request the item (green arrow above) and it will be ready for you to pick up in 1-4 business days. You can even decide what library is most convenient for you to pick it up.

The most important thing you can know about HOLLIS and the library is that you can ALWAYS ask for help! Librarians are here to help you. Regardless of your concentration or what year you are, there is always a librarian to help. Just ask!