Print reference books are available on a book cart. Please use our library's scanner to copy the pages you wish to use (so these limited resources can be shared with and used by everyone).

You may be able to find more books about a particular topic by searching catalogs in our library and other libraries:

         L-S Book Catalog

         Minuteman Library Network Catalog

         Boston Public Library Catalog

• Asia for Educators (Columbia)

• Internet Ancient History Sourcebook (Fordham University, Paul Halsall)

• Internet Classics Archive (MIT, Daniel C. Stevenson) 

• Perseus Digital Library (Tufts University)

Quotation Marks

Use quotations to find an exact phrase. For example:

"Middle Kingdom"

"Alexander the Great"

"Ramses II"

"Imperial Rome"

Truncation

Truncation finds different forms of the same word, in a single search. In truncation, a symbol is added to the end of a word root. Often, the symbol for truncation is an asterisk * . The asterisk tells the database to search for all forms of that word.  

For example, typing censor* in a database finds these results:

censor

censors

censored

censoring

censorship

Why use truncation? If a word has various endings and those variants essentially refer to the same concept, then truncation can save time, as it offers more complete search results in a single search. (Some word roots do not work well with truncation, because the word roots diverge into different concepts–for example, minor* would find minor, minors, minority, minorities, etc. or wom* would find womb, wombat, women, woman, etc.)

NOTE: An asterisk does truncation in the Advanced Search field of most–though not all–databases. If using a truncation symbol such as an asterisk, you may need to use the word “and” between your keyword terms (to avoid an error message). Each database offers a "Help" section which may provide its own specific guidance about truncation.

Advanced Searching & Sorting Results

Most databases provide links or a drop-down menu to sort by relevance or date.

Most databases have a link called Advanced or Advanced Search. Using Advanced Search, you can:

• limit the date range

• limit the document type

• refine your keyword search