Skip to Main Content

Environmental and Sustainability Education

This guide has been designed for all University of Toronto researchers, students and educators working at the intersection of environmental sustainability, climate change, and education.

Advanced Search

Using LibrarySearch
LibrarySearch is the main search box you'll find on the home pages of the OISE Library website as well as most University of Toronto Libraries websites. LibrarySearch is a quick tool for finding resources to support your learning and research. While the basic search box is a very helpful tool, it can often provide very broad results, especially for interdisciplinary research topics like sustainability and climate change. Below we'll step you through LibrarySearch's Advanced Search option. To learn more advanced research strategies tailored to your specific needs, please feel free to reach out to us!

Advanced Search

If your topic needs more than a single word or phrase to describe, the Advanced Search interface can help you build that more complex search. When opening Advanced Search, you will see two lines where a search term can be entered. You also have the option of adding additional lines. 

Advanced search showing where terms are entered and how to add additional lines.

Once you have entered your search terms, you can also place limits on how and where the database searches. Each downward pointing arrow in the following image provides a different way of modifying your search.

Advanced search interface highlighting where drop-down menus can be accessed.

Using the drop down menus on the left side, you can tell the database where in the item records you would like to look for each search term. For instance, you can limit your search to locate your keyword in titles or author names as illustrated in the following image. Click on any drop down menu to see what options it provides. 

Advanced search interface highlighting the title, author and other drop down menu options.

Using the drop down menus on the right side, you can tell the database to only include items in your results that adhere to a specific criteria. For instance, using the format menu you can ask to only see results that fit a specific format like books or articles.

Advanced search interface highlighting the item format drop down menu located on the right.

Using the language menu, you can ask to see only results that are published in a specific language.

Advanced search interface highlighting the language drop down menu located on the right.

And by using the date menus, you can limit your results to items published during a specific period of time.  

Advanced search interface highlighting date feature on the bottom right.

Bringing together multiple options allows you to build that more complex search required by your research topic.

Advanced search interface modified to direct the database to locate the first search term in item titles, the second search term anywhere in the item record. Drop down menus also selected to limit results to books in English published between 2000 and 2021.