You can search most (though not all) of what Penfield Library has access to using the main search box on our homepage. It includes all of Penfield Library's books and ebooks, a large proportion of our journal and magazine articles, and more.
Pull the most important concepts out of your topic / research question and use them as keywords. For example, if you want to know "What was fashion like in Ancient Rome?" you should pull out the keywords:
Combine your keywords with the word AND. Each keyword represents a different concept that you want to be included in each of your results. So our search about "What was fashion like in Ancience Rome?" would now be:
fashion AND Ancient Rome
It works the same regardless of what your topic is:
"How is generative AI impacting visual artists?" becomes generative AI AND visual artists
"What is the environmental impact of modular cellphones?" could become either environmental impact AND modular cellphones, or possibly environment AND impact AND modular cellphones
Try out some searches and see what works best for you!
Are you getting lots of results that don't seem relevant to what you're looking for? Try these steps:
Put quotation marks around any phrases you're using in your search. This will likely get you fewer results, and they should all be using the exact phrase from your search. Some examples:
Add more keywords to your search with AND. As you look at your results, are you realizing that you don't just want to know "How is generative AI impacting visual artists?", you actually want to know "How are visual artists responding to copyright concerns around generative AI?" Figure out what keyword(s) you can add to your search to focus more on exactly what interests you:
Adjust your existing keywords to make them more specific. Are you only interested in painters, rather than all visual artists? Is there one specific generative AI tool that you're interested in, rather than all of them in general? Do you only care about a specific time period of Ancient Roman fashion, or one particular brand of modular cell phone? Our examples could become:
Tweak your search results. Do you know you need to find a book, or a peer-reviewed journal article? Are you only interested in results from the past 5 years? You can filter your search results so you see only those things, using the Tweak Your Results section on the left of your results screen:
Take a look at the options under Tweak Your Results and decide if they would help you improve your search results.
If you're not getting enough (or any) results, try some of these steps:
Broaden your search topic. Sure, maybe your paper is only about how the AI tool Midjourney is affecting painters, but if you can find materials about AI art and copyright concerns, you can apply that content to what you're writing about. So maybe your "generative AI" AND "visual artists" search becomes something like "generative AI" AND copyright.
Other examples using the same searches from above:
Think of synonyms / related terms to your keywords, and add them to your search using the word OR. This is easiest to do when you look for a library database's Advanced Search screen, which usually gives you several search boxes to enter keywords into. Put all the synonyms for a given keyword in a single search box, connected to each other by the word OR. Then put your other keywords in a separate search box, like in the picture below:
Because Midjourney, Dall-E, and "generative AI" all represent the same concept, they all go into one search box like this: Midjourney OR Dall-E OR "generative AI". The "visual artists" part of the search is in a separate search box, connected to the first by a drop-down menu that says AND.
Other examples from the sample searches on this page could be: