In the college research environment, academic databases and library catalogs favor keyword searching. Below is a short video on this topic from colleagues at Lehman College. The author of this module chose this video specifically because it shows how keywords work in an article database; hopefully this can help us become more comfortable with how much Saints search and academic databases have in common. Sure, there are differences, but the similarities are really important to keep in mind.
When using academic databases or library catalogs, it is very important to learn how to connect keywords. While databases are useful tools, they are kind of stupid because they can only work with the language we put into them. The previous video introduced the Boolean operators AND and OR, but there are more tools available to us. The following video from colleagues at Beloit College introduces an additional Boolean operator, NOT, as well as the very useful concepts of phrase searching, truncating, and wildcarding.
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