Searching for Authors

If you are looking for resources written or edited by a particular person, you will do an author search in the library catalog.  Author searches should be done last name, first name.

If you are looking for books about a particular person, you will do a subject search in the library catalog.  Subject searches for information about people should also be conducted last name, first name.  Resources about authors are often broken down into particular categories using Library of Congress subject headings.

Searching for Topics

There are two ways to search for literary topics in the library catalog, subject and keyword searches.  Subject searches look in the Library of Congress subject headings, which have a consistent way of describing the information in library materials, leading you to very specific sources.  Because of this, occasionally you may miss some very relevant resources by only doing a subject search.

Keyword Suggestions for Children's and Young Adult Literature

Keyword searches look for the words you enter in every part of the records in the library catalog.  Keyword searches are very flexible, but may result in "false drops" or resources that have all the words you searched for, but are not actually on the topic you were searching.  There are a few techniques to help you create better keyword searches.

AND  When AND is placed between keywords, it searches for all the words, but the words need not be near each other and the relationship between the words is not necessarily important.  EXAMPLE: Milne and criticism

OR  Using OR allows you to search for similar words in one search.  EXAMPLE: Monsters and (children's or juvenile)

Truncation  Using a wildcard symbol (*) allows you to search for a root word with all of its possible endings.  EXAMPLE: Monster* and (children's or juvenile)