Contents

The Citation (citn) consists of the TI, AU, CA, PB, SO, ET, and DE fields.

The AN field contains a unique 12-character code that identifies the document.

The AU field identifies the person(s) responsible for the intellectual content of the document. Abbreviations are comp for compiler and ed for editor.

Author's names can be searched with or without hyphens. When searching without hyphens, type last name followed by first name or first name followed by last name. The order of the words does not matter.

When searching an author's name with hyphens, type the last name first and hyphenate all names and initials. Use truncation (*) if you are not sure about spelling.

You can search author names by last name, using the AUT Author Name index in Browse (Index).

The AUT field identifies the person(s) responsible for the intellectual content of the document. Use Browse to search for the author by last name in this Author Name index. The AUT field is for searching only; it does not display on the record.

The CA field contains the name of an association, institution, conference, corporation, or government agency that is the author of an essay or collection.

Fields
Contents

CN Call Numbers
(a limit field)

The CN field lists the Dewey Decimal classification number and the Library of Congress classification number for books.

The DE field lists the controlled vocabulary terms that describe the book. The Descriptors field can include personal names, uniform titles, topical terms, organization names, and geographic names.

Use hyphens to focus your search; use without hyphens to enlarge your search.

In the example above, literature in de retrieves all records with the word literature in the subject, such as literature-and-history and american-literature-history-and-criticism as well as women-in-literature. A search for epic-literature-american in de retrieves only books with that specific descriptor.

You can also search descriptors using the SU Subjects List index in Browse (Index).

books in dt
dt=books

The Document Type field describes the contents of the record. There are two document types: books and book-chapter. You can limit your search to books only or to chapters only.

The ET field contains the titles of the essays included in the book. You can lateral search an essay by selecting its title in the ET field.

The HB field lists the ISBN to be used for the link to holdings.

IB ISBN

0813515041 in ib
ib=0813515041

The IB field lists the International Standard Book Number for the book. Omit hyphens when searching for an ISBN.

1054-8386 in is
is=1054-8386

The IS field lists the International Standard Serial Number for a series of publications. Include hyphens when searching for an ISSN.

The LA field lists the language of the original document. All books indexed for Essay and General Literature Index are in English.

The 12-digit link number is derived from the accession number of book entries and component chapters and essays, and links them together. The LN field lets you retrieve all records for the book and its parts.

The NT field contains additional information not included in other fields in the record.

The OT field contains a variant form of the title of a book. You can search any word or phrase in this field.

The PB field contains the name of the publisher of a book, the publication date, and pagination.

The PD field contains details about illustrative or graphic material that appears in a book. The PD field contains one or more codes that describe the illustrative material.

The following is a list of codes and the physical description each represents:

PY Publication Year

Fields
Contents

The Publication Year lists the year in which an essay or book was published. This field is range searchable.

If the document is part of a series, the SE field indicates the title of the series.

The SO field contains information about the book in which an essay is found. It includes the book title, publisher, year of publication, and the page numbers of the chapter within the book.

When viewing a record of a chapter, you can select the book title from the Source field for lateral searching to view records of other essays in the book.

The SU field lists the controlled vocabulary terms that describe the material. The field can include personal names, topical names organization names, and geographic names. This field is for browsing descriptors using the SU Subject List index in Browse (Index). The SU field does not display in the record. Subject headings display in the DE Descriptors field.

cultural criticism in ti

The Title field contains the title of the document. You can search for any word or phrase in a title.

The TIL field lists the titles of books and book-chapters. The field is for browsing titles using the TIL field in Browse (Index). Enter the titles without initial articles such as a or the.

The TIL field does not display in the record. Titles display in the TI Title field.

The UT field contains the standardized title for a work. In this database it is usually the title of a periodical in which a collection of essays was originally published.

The ZA field combines the Author(s) (AU) and Corporate Author (CA) fields.

The ZS field combines the Publisher (PB) and Source (SO) fields.

The ZT field combines the Other Titles (OT), Title (TI), and Uniform Title (UT) fields.

The Citation (CITN) in Essay and General Literature Index consists of the TI, AU, CA, PB, SO, ET, IB, and DE fields.

Limit fields, when combined with other search terms, are particularly useful for focusing or limiting a search. To search a limit field, use the in or = operator with the field abbreviation, such as 1994 in py or py=1994. Omitting the field label retrieves information from free text (non-limit) fields only.

For limit fields containing numeric data, you can also use other special operators:

= equal to,
such as py=1990

< less than,
such as py<1991

> greater than,
such as py>1989

<= less than or equal to,
such as py<=1990

>= greater than or equal to,
such as py>=1992

- within a range,
such as py=1991-1993

Below are several examples of the types of searches you can use to retrieve information from this database.

Authors' names appear in the Author(s) AU or Corporate Author CA fields.

To see all personal authors with the same last name or to see variations of an author's name, use the Browse (Index). You can search for authors' names using the AUT Author Name index in Browse (Index).

For example, to look for works by Elie Wiesel:

1. Go to Browse (Index).

2. Select the AUT Author Name index.

3. Type wiesel.

Searching Using Descriptors

The Descriptors (DE) field lists the controlled vocabulary terms that describe the document. This field can include personal names, uniform names, topical titles, organization names, and geographic names.

You can search in the DE field with or without hyphens. Searching a single term, (for example, pollution in de) retrieves records containing any descriptor with the word pollution, such as water pollution or air pollution. The search water-pollution in de retrieves just that specific subject.

With hyphens, the terms must be an exact match. Search for pollution- if you want only those records indexed with the single term pollution.

You can search for Descriptors using the SU Subject List index in Browse (Index).

For most efficient searching, use hyphenated descriptors. For example, epic-literature-american in de is an efficient way of retrieving this three-word descriptor. The search military policy in de takes longer, and also retrieves additional longer descriptors that contain the words "military policy", such as france-military-policy-1945-, military-policy-decision-making, united-states-military-policy-public-opinion, etc.

You can also search descriptors by selecting the phrases directly from the SU Subjects Index or from the displayed records through lateral searching. If the descriptor text is exceptionally long, look up the term in the Subject Index rather than lateral searching.

Searching Using Wildcards and Truncation

Searching with wildcards and truncation lets you retrieve records containing variations of your term. For example, let's search for records of documents, published after 1995, about postmodern literature.

1. Conduct a search for post?modern*. Using the wildcard symbol (?) searches for both postmodern and post-modern. Using the truncation symbol (*) searches for all variations of the root term postmodern, such as postmodern, postmodernism, and so on.

2. Conduct a search for and py>1995. Beginning the search request with the AND operator automatically adds it to the previous search. Limiting your search to the Publication Year (PY) field ensures that you will retrieve only records published after 1995.

Certain words of little intrinsic meaning appear too frequently to be useful in searching text. Information systems call these "stopwords." You will not be able to search for the following words alone in the database. They can, however, be included in a phrase by surrounding all the text with quotation marks.

an
and
are
for
from
in
of
or
that
the
was
were
which
with

The truncation symbol (*) serves as a substitute for any string of zero or more characters. The symbol must be used at the end of your search term. Truncating a term retrieves all variants of that term, including cognates in foreign languages. This is useful if you would like to retrieve records that contain other forms of your term.

The search modern* will find any record containing modern, modernism, modernity, etc. Unfortunately, truncation often retrieves out-of-context hits, and should be used carefully.

The wildcard symbol (a question mark) serves as a substitute for zero or one character. For example, the search behavio?r retrieves records containing behavior or behaviour.

Wildcards can be used anywhere in your search term, except as the first character, and you can use more than one wildcard.