Introduction to the Library

WorldCat Discovery is the online catalog for Omar Seddiqui Research Library. You can use the discovery layer to do the following:

• Search for articles, tests and measures, books/eBooks, journals, DVDs, and more. 
• Locate resources at libraries worldwide.
• Request items that are not in the circulating collection at Omar Seddiqui Research Library (i.e. Interlibrary Loan).

Read on to learn about how to construct a search in WorldCat Discovery and search our collections!

Boolean operators serve as the underpinning of navigating and retrieving the desired results from a database or search engine. Understanding how these operators function and their relationship to your search terms will serve you well in your research. 

The three Boolean operators are known as the following: AND, OR, and NOT. You can connect your keywords and subject terms to these operators to craft very precise, complex search queries when your topic contains multiple themes or search terms. This will aid you in locating resources that support your research.

When you're searching in a library database, you will notice the default in any advanced search will almost always default to the AND operator. 

The purpose of the AND operator in a database or search engine is to do the following:

• narrow the results
• instruct the database that the connected terms must be present in the resulting records

An example of this kind of search would be: gender AND inequality AND wage.

Some points to consider about the AND operator:

• In some databases, the AND operator is implied. When conducting a search in Google it will automatically insert AND in between your search terms.
• While your search terms will be present in the results, they may not be connected to the topic you're researching. A search such as gender inequality wage gap would be translated as the following: gender AND inequality AND wage AND gap. The words themselves may appear individually across various records in the results page, which could lead to mixed findings for your research.
• To make this more precise you could try phrases instead. For example: "gender inequality" AND "wage gap" would yield more results targeting that specific topic.

The Boolean operator OR is used to:

• connect two or more ideas that are similar (synonyms)
• expand the scope of your results; essentially, you're instructing the database to retrieve results that mention one or all of the connected search terms
• For example: gender OR gender identity 

You would use Boolean operator NOT to:

• exclude specific words or phrases from your search
• narrow the scope of your search; you're telling the database to focus on the first term in your search string and ignore the second term.
• For example: relationships NOT romance 

To use WorldCat Discovery, follow these steps:
1. Enter your search terms into the WorldCat search box to locate books, articles, journals, etc. 

2. If you have a specific title in mind, type it into the search box with closed quotations, like the following example: "Millon Inventories : a Practitioner's Guide to Personalized Clinical Assessment". This is known as an exact phrase search, which can yield more precise results. 

3. Use the search filters on the left if you have too many results to sift through. You can restrict to just articles, books, videos, etc. by navigating to the Format section and selecting the boxes most relevant to your search. The default search will always show holdings at Palo Alto University, but if you wish to see other libraries in the search select the box for libraries worldwide under the Held By Library section. 

4. If you find a title that interests, check to see if it's an eBook title or a print copy in the library. An eBook will have View eBook as an option, while a print copy will have a location and call number for the title in question, as demonstrated in the screenshot below. Clicking the title of the resource will give you more information about its contents and the subject terms that describe the main ideas of the resource.

If you'd like to learn more about how to effectively search the library's databases, take a look at our database searching guide.