College libraries hold a wide range of materials such as electronic content with articles from journals, magazines, newspapers, and streaming videos. Most libraries still contain physical items like books, DVDs, CDs, journals, magazines, newspapers, and these can usually be searched by the single search as well. This can sometimes be confusing and can lead to a lot of search results. Fortunately, single search provides you with ways to limit search results so that you can identify what you’re looking for.

Example Search

Let’s consider the scenario presented at the beginning of this chapter. You need to find resources related to the American Revolution—specifically you need to find two books and one documentary film. Let’s look at how you can do this with a single search.

If you search for American Revolution, you will see a search result that looks very similar to the one below:

Filtering Results: Availability & Resource Type

In your search results, you should notice some key details. Pay attention to the area to the left of your search results, where you can use filters that control your search results. The first set of filters is labeled as “Availability.” This will indicate how the resources are available. Are they available online? As peer-reviewed journals? You should notice there is an option that says “Held by Library” or something similar to indicate that your library owns those materials. This is a great filter to use to limit your search results that you can access at your library.

Another area to look at is “Resource Type.” Here, you’ll find different formats that you can limit your search results to. For our scenario, what types of resources do you need?  We need two books. When you look at the image above, you’ll see that there are 6,693 books that are available in our search results. By clicking on “Books,” you will then be able to browse a list of those items.