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ENGL 2750: Film, Culture, and Literature

Quick tips

  1. Ask for help! Even if you're an experienced student-researcher, librarians can help you grow and you encounter new challenges. 
  2. Search for sources in more than one discipline 
  3. Use interlibrary loan- It's easy and free, and will greatly expand the amount of information available to you. 
  4. Some databases reward going beyond SLUth and accessing the product individually. See Databases tab to your left for suggestions. 

Better googling

  • Adding site:.xxx to a search can limit to a type of domain. This is particularly useful if you want to limit your results to government websites. 
    • Example: armadillos site:.gov
    • Example: flowers site:.edu
  • Quotation marks will retrieve results with an exact phrase, rather than a group of words anywhere in the result.  
    • Example: "Four score and seven years ago"
  • An asterisk at the end of a word in your search will retrieve any possible ending for that word. (You can also do this in the beginning or middle of a word, but it's most commonly used this way). 
    • Example: machin* will retrieve results with machine, machinery, machination, etc. 
    • Example: lead* will retrieve results with leadership, leading, leaders, but also results about lead poisoning. 
  • Consider what words you're using to search might mean in other fields, and adjust if your search needs to be more specific. 
    • Example: "branding" means something very different in marketing than it does in agriculture.