Education Subject Guide — Find Books

To find books, use the Library's General Search, found under the Find tab on the Library's homepage or directly at http://search.lib.uconn.edu.

The Advanced Search provides many more options for creating your search; we recommend starting with the Advanced Search to make searching easier.  Use the Advanced Search link next to the basic search box.

Advanced Search Guide

The Library's General Search searches across a broad spectrum of resources. To find only books and ebooks, select Material Type: Books in the Advanced Search

Finding Books on a Topic / Keyword

Keyword searches look for your term(s) in the title, author, description, and subject fields. Using the Creating Keywords guide, enter your key words and phrases in the search. Remember to Refine and Revise your search based on your results. 

If you find books that might be useful, look at the subjects listed in the Details tab. Those subjects can be used to find more books on your topic.

Finding Books by Author or Title

If you are looking for a specific title or author, you can set your search to look for your term(s) in just those fields. Choose either Title or Author/creator to search title and/or author terms.

Start with a keyword search. Keyword searches look for your terms in the title, author, description, and subject fields.
To find only books on the topic, Refine Results to books in the right column.

If you do not get any (or enough) results, your search might be too narrow or you might be entering too many terms (example: cigarette, smoking, health, teenagers, effects). Try to broaden your search by entering only one or two key concepts (smoking, teenagers).

If you get too many results, try to add terms to your search to explore a more specific aspect. For example, a search for "violence" produces over 10,000 results. Adding "media" produces still over 600 results. Searching "violence" "media" and "gender" together narrows the results to a (more) manageable number.

If you find books that might be useful, look at the subjects listed in the Details tab. Those subjects can be used to find more books on your topic.