CTVA 310: History of American Cinema

Your searchable topics are informed by your assignment prompt. Consider the following example using the Advanced search function in OneSearch:

• Subject ="Film adaptations" AND gothic literature 

Figure 1:

Figure 1 illustrates multiple techniques to increase the relevance of your search results by using:

• subject searching to ensure your results are reasonably ABOUT your search terms.
• the "is (exact)" function from the drop menu to ensure that multiple words are searched as a single term.
• the boolean operator "AND" to pull results that contain both sets of terms.

Figure 2:

Figure 2 illustrates a catalog record produced by the subject search using the search terms "Film adaptations" and "gothic literature". Note how these terms appear in the subjects assigned to the resource, assuring that the resource is sufficiently about the search terms used in the search. 

Use Advanced Search in order to isolate how the search engine treats your search terms to help locate the most relevant resources for film analyses.

1. In the first search bar add the TITLE of your film verbatim. 
2. Use the drop menu to select "contains exact phrase".
3. Selecting "Title" (and in cases of very popular films, "Subject") helps increase the relevance of your results.
4. In the second search bar, add the name of the DIRECTOR. This helps disambiguate results from films adapted from literature. Run search.
5. Review your results list and use the filters on the left to isolate works of analysis, such as articles, peer-reviewed articles and scholarly books, or book chapters.
6. To increase the number of results, change "Title" search to "Any field".

Figure 1: Constructing your search in OneSearch using TITLE and DIRECTOR

To locate sources for your assignment: 

1. Enter the title of the work or main subject of the prompt into the first search bar. If using a book or film title, use "is (exact)" from the drop menu.
2. Enter personal names (or corporate name(s) if not the main subject of your search) or secondary topic into subsequent search bars. Set search bars to "is (exact)"  (or use quotations marks) if searching names or topics with multiple words.

Figure 1: Sample search

Once your list of results is populated, use the filters on the left to choose a resource type, refine your topic, or show only peer-reviewed articles.