Online Databases & Electronic Resources

Online databases quickly sort through thousands of records to identify articles or books on a topic.

Before you choose a particular database for your search, it is helpful to know some fundamentals about searching.

Field Search by Subject for Focused Results

The parts of each record or citation in a database are searchable. These parts are called fields.

When you search by a field, the computer will "look" only in that field when it looks through all the records in the database. It will try to match your search term.

Magic of Indexing

A keyword search looks for items anywhere in the record. It is the broadest search but indexing allows you to search in specific fields.