Library and Information Science

When starting your research, you'll need to get the big picture on your topic. One good way to go about this is to consult a reference source like the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science or Wikipedia. Use this stage as an opportunity to get deeply familiar with your topic: learn the specialized lingo, read about related topics, and identify key themes or issues.

When you search for books, articles, and more, it is a good idea to carefully select keywords to reduce your results to only sources that are relevant to your topic. Because you've already familiarized yourself with the key themes of your topic, you'll probably have a handful of keywords to use. Use these tips to super-charge your search results:

• use AND in between search terms to group them together (ex: "interactive AND timeline" searches for results that contain both key words)
• use OR for more results (ex: "Content Management System OR CMS" shows results for both)
• use NOT if you want to exempt a word from your results (ex: "animation NOT 3D" returns results for animation that is not three-dimensional)
• use quotation marks "_" to isolate phrases (ex: "Point pattern analysis" returns results that have the exact phrase in the record content while ignoring results with just the words 'point,' 'pattern,' or 'analysis' independently)
• use the wildcard * to get all versions of a word (ex: "map*" returns results for 'maps' as well as 'mappable.')

Try these databases to narrow yourself to good sources of Library & Information Science literature.