9. oneSEARCH is the primary search tool to look for books and articles in the Library’s collections.
Go to the big search box on the Library’s website. This is oneSEARCH. It searches print books, e-books, e-book chapters and many (but not all) of our article databases at the same.
If you're doing research on a particular short story, you can just start with the story title as a search and see what comes up.
"sonny's blues"
"where are you going where have you been"
"bartleby the scrivener"
girl jamaica kincaid
Sometimes browsing the results will give you ideas for additional themes, terms, and searches. While oneSEARCH understands natural language searches, it is still a good idea to set up your searches in terms of keywords, and linking them together using AND. So if you're doing research on the James Baldwin and the influence of jazz in African American communities, then a possible search could be:
"james baldwin" AND (music OR jazz) AND ("african american" OR black) AND communities
Here are some additional sample searches based on themes that are being expressed in different American short stories:
"james baldwin" AND (music OR jazz)
"sonny's blues" AND (music OR jazz)
(work OR employment) AND "bartleby the scrivener"
routine AND "bartleby the scrivener"
office AND "bartleby the scrivener"
girl AND "jamaica kincaid" AND gender
girl AND "jamaica kincaid" AND (women OR gender)
girl AND "jamaica kincaid" AND (womanhood OR girlhood)
"where are you going, where have you been" AND adolescence
"where are you going, where have you been" AND (parents OR "parental oversight")
Sample results from oneSEARCH. Note that these all come up in a search for sources about "Bartleby the Scrivener," but each source addresses a different aspect or theme of the story (of which there are many). Browsing through the sources can be helpful - you might be drawn to some sources and not to others - as well as giving you ideas for additional terms or themes to use in your searching.
The first three results are ebooks, and the remaining four results are articles in scholarly (peer reviewed) journals. Note the PEER REVIEWED tag beneath the citation. Click on the “Available Online” link to access to the full-text of the source.
To limit your search to ONLY peer reviewed articles in OneSEARCH, click on the “Peer Reviewed Journals” filter on the left-hand side of your search results. To limit your search to ONLY online sources (not print), click on the “Full Text Online” filter.
Now that you’ve found some sources using oneSEARCH, let’s go into some article databases. The Brooklyn College Library subscribes to over 400 different article databases and although oneSEARCH searches a lot of them at the same time, it doesn’t search all of them.
