First Year Experience

OneSearch provides a simple way to search for books, eBooks, videos, articles, digital media, and more, all in one place. In the search box above, you will see a drop-down list of options for filtering your search. To find books, you have several options:

• Library holdings only: This is the local holdings catalog. Our catalog includes physical items found on the shelves in the Tredway Library, as well as electronic items like eBooks and videos. This search also includes items in Special Collections and the Swenson Center. 
• All I-Share Libraries: This searches for physical books and media from other academic libraries across Illinois. Many of these items can be requested for delivery to Tredway Library through a service called I-Share (eBooks, with some exceptions, are normally not available to request due to licensing restrictions).  
• Tredway resources (Library holdings + Articles): This searches all of the library's physical and electronic resources (books, eBooks, videos, journal/magazine articles, and electronic references sources. This search also includes items in Special Collections and the Swenson Center.

Advanced Search

To perform an advanced search, click on the "advanced search" link located just below the OneSearch box above. You'll not only be able to select which collections to search in, you'll also see different fields you can enter your search terms in. You can also limit by material type, language, and publication date. 

As you do your research, there are three parts of an item's record in the library catalog that might be of special use: the subjects (which help you find other materials related by subject), the description (which gives a basic summary), and the contents (which can help you identify which chapters of a book might be most useful for you to focus on).  Of course, some records will have more details than others, but it's always worth a look!

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Here are a number of search tricks to keep in mind when using our OneSearch catalog.

• About stop words -- Many databases ignore very common English words and contractions, sometimes called "stop words" (such as a, an, the, in, of, on, if, into, etc.).  Be careful when using stop words in searches as you may get unexpected results (e.g. searching for "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer will tend to ignore both "into" and "the" and search only for "wild" -- though OneSearch is getting better at parsing these than it used to be).
• Use quotations marks to keep phrases together like "West Side Story" and "social justice". But be careful -- make sure something is really a phrase or you might miss important results. Stop words may also still be ignored in exact phrase searches!
• Use truncation (putting * after the root of a word) to find variations of a word. Librar* finds library, libraries, librarian, and librarians. This can be a very useful tool for expanding a search to include related terms.
• Using boolean operators -- these are simple words (AND, OR, NOT) used as conjunctions to combine or exclude keywords in a search, resulting in more focused and productive results. This should save time and effort by eliminating inappropriate hits that must be scanned before discarding.  Some databases will have a dropdown menu next to search boxes to make easier use of these operators.
  • AND -- requires both terms to be in each item returned. If one term is contained in the document and the other is not, the item is not included in the resulting list. (Narrows the search)
  • OR -- either term (or both) will be in the returned document. (Broadens the search) 
  • NOT -- the first term is searched, then any records containing the term after the operators are subtracted from the results. (Be careful with use as the attempt to narrow the search may be too exclusive and eliminate good records). If you need to search the word not, that can usually be done by placing double quotes around it.
• Using parentheses -- Using the ( ) to enclose search strategies will customize your results to more accurately reflect your topic. Search engines deal with search statements within the parentheses first, then apply any statements that are not enclosed.
  • Example: A search on (smoking or tobacco) and cancer returns articles containing: smoking and cancer; tobacco and cancer; smoking, tobacco, and cancer all together; but does not return results about smoking or tobacco when cancer is not mentioned.