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How to Do Things With Words: Books and Articles: Library Catalog

Searching the Catalog

Try using keywords to perform a basic search, or try using Advanced Search to combine search terms using Boolean operators:

Once you've run a search, consider sorting by best match and limiting to specific formats.

Once you find an item that may be of interest, click on the title to view a detailed record. Here, you can find more information about the book (hint: subjects are hyperlinked -- clicking on one will run a search for other items tagged with that heading!):

 

When we have an item, here's what you'll see:

Article records look a little different. You'll need to locate the publication name, volume, issue, and/or date in order to find the article in the library periodicals section.

Interlibrary Loan

If you find an item that we do NOT have online or in the library, you can get it via interlibrary loan. Simply click on the Request Item through Interlibrary Loan button, fill out a bit of contact information, and we'll let you know when it's here (allow approximately 2 weeks for delivery).

General Searching Tips (works for databases, too!)

Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) allow you to combine search terms in ways that are more precise than natural language search (i.e., typing a question into a box as you would with Google). AND and NOT will both narrow your search, whereas OR will broaden your search.

  • performative utterance AND anthropology -- returns results for items related to both terms (not just one)
  • performative utterance AND anthropology AND austin -- returns results for items related to all three terms
  • performative utterance OR speech acts -- returns results for items related to either term (or both)
  • art NOT painting -- returns results for art, but not for painting

Most systems combine AND terms together first before OR-linked terms. Therefore, you should use (parentheses) when creating complex searches, like this:

  • (performative utterance OR speech acts) AND psychology

Use quotation marks ("") to force a search for an exact phrase instead of searching for each individual term. A search for "speech acts" will be more precise than a search for speech acts. If you searched for the latter, you may get results for general works about speech and speeches in addition to linguistic speech acts, and that may be way too many results to sift through!

Use truncation symbols (usually *) to search for variations of a word. A search for feminis* will return results for feminist, feminists, feminism, etc.