Advanced Searching

Structuring an effective search in Orbis, an index, or full-text database can be tricky. What follows is a handful of helpful hints that will help you focus your search and get you the results you need.

Orbis / Art Full Text (Wilson Web) / ARTbibliogrpahies Modern on the Web (CSA)

Orbis

Orbis, Yale University Library's online catalog, holds records for over 12 million items in the 22 different libraries of Yale's Library system. When using the simple search screen for Orbis (i.e. single text box) it helps to use, in library speak, boolean operators, limitors, and truncation sybols to narrow your search terms. What exactly is a boolean operator? Let's find out with the following example.

Say you are looking for a book on French painting. Go to Orbis and select the keyword option to the right of the search box. This is crucial because if you use keywords to search for a title you will likely find nothing. Please note that a keyword search will locate your search terms ANYWHERE in an items record. Title, author, publisher, etc. Keeping that in mind, type the following terms:

french paint? (3570 results)

The question mark at the end of "paint" will retrieve a variety of terms with the root of paint: painter, paintings, paints, etc. It is a way to be more

inclusive with an initial search.

Note that Orbis automatically inserts AND between the two terms, which means Orbis searched for the terms as separate words occurring anywhere

in the record, NOT as a phrase.

This search retrieves over 3,500 results - way too many. Say you want to narrow the search to exclude items about Impressionism:

(french paint?) NOT impression? (3264 results - still too many but 300 fewer than before)

Two things are different in this search. One, the parentheses around "french paint?" searches for those terms as a discrete phrase occurring in that

order. Second, the NOT in between the first terms and "impression?" excludes all versions of the term impression? (impressionism, impressionist, etc)

from the retrieved results.

Now we can add another term to the search to further narrow the topic:

(french paint?) NOT impression? AND modern? (721 entries)

Now we have further limited the search to include variants of the term modern (modernism, modernist, moderne, etc). Essentially, we care looking for

items about modern french painting but not ones about Impressionism.

Finally we can refine our search by using the "More Limits" button in the lower right corner of the Orbis search page or using the "Set Limits" button in the upper right corner of results list, which takes you to a separate page where you can limit the search by location, material type, language, publishing date, etc. Let's limit the search to English, the Art & Architecture Libray, and to a date range of 1990-2007. Now are search looks encompasses:

(french paint?) NOT impression? AND modern? - English language only in the Art & Architecture Library published between 1990-2007 (57 entries)

By adding a couple additional keywords to the search and limiting the materials by three factors we went from an overwhelming 3,500+ entries to a

manageable 57!

Art Full Text

Yale subscribes to many (hundreds) of databases and indexes that contain citations and abstracts to articles and sometimes full-text access to articles. Remember, you can search for journal titles in Orbis but you cannot search Orbis for the contents of journals. One index of particular interest to School of Art students is Art Full Text, which indexes art publications from around the globe, from 1984-present with coverage back to 1928 in Art Retrospective, a separate database that can be searched simulataneosly with Art Full Text via Wilson Web. There is no guarantee that what you find in a database will be available at Yale. You must double-check Orbis to see if a particular journal or periodical is owned by Yale after locating a citation through Art Full Text. Keeping that in mind, here are a few tips on finding specific articles in Art Full Text.

Articles on Exhibits

Art Full Text enables users to limit their search to articles about exhibitions. To do this, make sure you are in the advanced search page. From there, choose an artist, we'll use Olafur Eliasson, as either a Keyword (for broader results) or, using the drop down menu on the right, as Artist. Then type exhibit in the search box below and in the drop down menu to the right scroll down and select Document Type. Note you can also use the Document Type drop down menu near the bottom of the search page and select other types to limit you search by. This fefature allows you to limit your search many different types of documents in addition to exhibition reviews: interviews, book review, feature article, do-it-yourself publication, etc.

Articles with Photos, Illustrations, Plans, and Other Graphics

Art Full Text also enables users to search for articles that contain specific types of graphics: drawings, illustrations, drawings, photographs, etc. To do this kind of search for an artist, type the person's name and select them as Keyword from the right hand menu again. This time, let's use James Turrell. Next, enter the follwing terms into the next search box: photo* OR draw* OR plan*. In the drop down menu on the right side select the option Physical Description. The asterisk used at the end of the search terms is a truncation symbol that will search for variants of the root word photo, draw, and plan, respectively. In short, what you have done is search for articles about James Turrell that include photographs or photos, drawing or drawings, plan or plans.