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Wellesley College Research Guides

ENG/AMST 262: Writing Massachusetts: Four Authors

Selected Subject-Specific Databases

Go to the Databases A-Z list and filter by subject to find additional choices.

Search the Library Catalog

Intro to the Library Catalog

Why search the library catalog?

The library catalog is another way to search for books, ebooks, and videos. Searching the catalog will give you a more focused set of results than searching for books in SuperSearch. You can also use the subject terms to easily browse related materials.

Start with a keyword search. Once you find a book that's relevant to your topic, click on the title and look for Subjects towards the bottom of the page to help you find "more like this."

Sample keyword search for 

  • women AND travel AND europe


leads to linked subject terms and more books related to this topic

Women travelers

Women travelers in literature

Europe > Description and travel.


Not finding enough? Search WorldCat and request books through Interlibrary Loan.

Search Tips

Use quotation marks " " to search words as a phrase. This will narrow your results.

"grand tour" 

Use AND to combine multiple concepts in your search. This will narrow your results.

"grand tour" AND women

Use OR to find different ways your topic could be expressed. This will expand your results. These don't have to be synonyms — they can be related ideas. Group these related terms in parentheses, so the database interprets them first. The following search will find all results that contain "grand tour" along with any one of the terms in parentheses.

"grand tour" AND (women OR female OR gender OR feminism)

Use an asterisk * to find variant endings. This will expand your results. For example,  femininis* will find feminism, feminist, feminists, etc.

"grand tour" AND (women OR female OR gender OR  femininis*)