CTVA 400: Media and Society

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: Multiple Search bars

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: Subject terms in the catalog record

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. 

Once your results are populated, use the filters on the left to isolate topics, resource types, peer-reviewed articles, and more.

Consider your specific topic in relation to the broad topics of this course, and construct a search using OneSearch (advanced) that represents the intersection of all the topics in your search. In this example the subjects "Mass media" and "Social aspects" provide a broad foundation with which to add a more specific topic. If you are not returning a satisfactory number of results consider changing "Subject" to "Any field" for any of the search boxes.

Figure 1: Search template for locating sources about media and society.

Once you have retrieved your results, consider refining them using the filters on the left.