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HISB03: Critical Writing and Research for Historians

This guide will help you to find the resources needed to complete your research assignments.

LibrarySearch for Books

On the library website, go to the LibrarySearch box

Search using the keywords of your topic. Combine keywords using AND, OR, NOT.

Here is a search for books about race AND voting:

image of library search box, searching for race and voting

The results page will show books, articles, journals, and more. To filter your results to find books on your topic, look at filter options on the left. Under "format" the options are listed by amount of results, so if you don't see books, click on show more, then find and click the box beside books and click "apply filters."

              image of options for filtering search results, highlighting the format option and pointing at show more button.                                                          image of format filtering options, highlighting books option and button to apply filters.

 

Now the results you see should be books, but you can keep using other filtering options to narrow your down search and find the best books for your research needs.

You can limit to online books, or print books that are available in the library, and you can search in specific libraries.

You can also limit by publication date, language, or subject. For example, for this topic I might want to narrow my search to include the subjects of History and the United States. So I would click on the boxes beside History and United States, then click "apply filters."

image of subject filter options, highlighting history and united states, and pointing to apply filters button.


When you find a book you want, click on it to see the full record and the information of where to find the book.

If it's an ebook available line, you can click on the links to read it. If it's available in a library, you can see which libraries have it, whether it is currently available or not, and what the call number is to find it on the shelves.

image of book record with ebook links and library location highlighted
 

If you need to request a hold on the book or want to request inter-campus delivery (ICD) of the book from St George or UTM to UTSC Library, please sign in to access the request options.