URAF HSURV Library Guide

HOLLIS is Harvard Library's discovery platform. It searches broadly across subjects, languages, time periods, and information formats.

Catalog & Articles searches the catalog plus billions of citations, including journal, newspaper, and magazine articles. Or you can choose Library Catalog from the drop-down to limit to Harvard collections.

Use HOLLIS to:

• Get access to a specific item - you can generally just copy and paste the citation into HOLLIS
• Perform all-purpose searching on a topic
• Explore Harvard Library's local collections

HOLLIS FAQs & User Guide

Visit HOLLIS FAQs to explore specific tasks and functions.

Visit the HOLLIS User Guide to understand HOLLIS’s overall capabilities.

HOLLIS Tips

Filter to books and/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 by relying solely on the titles of books.

Filter to Peer Reviewed Articles

This will limit your results on scholarly journal articles. Note that this filter eliminates newspaper and magazine articles as well as books and book chapters.

Consider limiting your results to more recent publications

Experiment with limiting to the last 5, 10, 15, or 20 years to get a snapshot of the most recent research trends and scholarly approaches in a field, or around a particular topic.

Add keywords that describe the type of material you want

• handbook  or companion or encyclopedia  are common words to help identify good background or overview sources.
• criticism brings up secondary source studies of a book, film, artwork, musical piece, play, artist or writer, etc
• history gets 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. Compare with challenges (and its opposite: opportunities). 

Operator	Example	Description
“ ”	"The color purple"	Searches for your terms as an exact phrase. Great for title searches. Note: quotation marks around a single word will exclude variant spellings and common synonyms.
OR	NSA OR "National Security Agency"	Either term can be present in your results. Allows you to include multiple synonyms in the same search.
NOT	cellular NOT phone	Excludes any results where the search term is present. Helpful for disambiguation. Beware inadvertent exclusions!
AND	genetic AND variation	All terms must be present in your results. Typically used in conjunction with parentheses for complex searching. In the absence of other operators, HOLLIS uses AND as the default connector. Genetic variation returns the same results as genetic AND variation.
Pro tip HOLLIS will only recognize Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) that are in ALL CAPS. Learn more about Boolean operators (MIT Libraries guide).
( )	("Affordable Care Act" OR Obamacare) AND "birth control"	Groups search elements. Use when mixing Boolean operators to ensure the system processes your search in the intended order.
*	child*	Matches to any word that begins with the specified string (also known as truncation). Child* finds child, children, childhood, childproof, childbirth, etc.
?	wom?n	Unspecified character (also known as wildcard). The system will match ? to any single character. wom?n finds women and woman. feminis? finds feminist and feminism but not feminists or feminisms.