To find items located in the Library use the catalog search box below.
Shortening your keywords -- You can search words with a common root by "truncating" them with an *. For example, Friend* will search friends, friendly, friendship, and so on. Keeping words in phrases together -- It's important to keep words in phrases together to keep them in context. For example, "platonic love" would bring up items on platonic love. If you didn't use the quotation marks you might end up with items about Plato's works generally which is not exactly what you are looking for.
Keywords are the critical words used to describe your topic in the literature. For example: pain people. Notice -- the less important words like: an, in, the, of are left out of the statement. Every word you ask for has to be present in the item you're retreiving, so just use the words you really need.
Subject links are provided by the Library of Congress cataloging librarians to describe your topic consistently. For example, you might be interested in people's response to pain, but the most important work is titled, "Suffering and Moral Responsibility" which doesn't use any of the words you chose initially.
So, your best searching technique in library catalogs would be to:
When you use a huge catalog like World Cat, it's good to search using subject terms you identified in Bridge rather than by keyword.