University Writing Seminar 8B: All What Jazz? (UWS 15A)  

When searching LOUIS, use the techniques detailed in the Search Tips box to the right. Relevant subject headings include:

Jazz

Popular music

Hip-hop

Rap (music)

Art

Literature

Film

To search for materials about jazz-influenced popular music, rap, hip hop, or rock, do an advanced search for jazz as a subject term AND the other terms (combined in an OR statement) as subjects ("popular music" or rap or hip-hop or rock). Limit your search to books:

SU: jazz and SU ("popular music" or rap or hip-hop or rock)

To search for materials about jazz-influenced visual artists, start with a keyword search, and click on relevant subject headings:

jazz and art →"Jazz in art"

Note additional relevant subject headings when you browse the index of subject headings:

"Jazz in literature"

"Jazz in motion pictures"

These subject headings will also work in many databases as well.

• Remember to enclose search phrases in quotes:

"the roots"

This ensures that the database will return results that include the entire phrase

"the roots"

rather than records that contain both of these words, but not necessarily your search phrase:

records that include the word "the" and the word "roots" but not necessarily the phrase "the roots"

Doing this will help you avoid sifting through irrelevant results.

• Begin with a keyword search of your topic:

jazz and art

and note the related subject headings that come up in relevant results:

"Jazz in art"

• To search for more than one variant of a term, use truncation:

art* will search for

art, arts, artist and artists

The database searches for any word that begins with the letters that precede the truncation symbol (in this case, an asterisk). Some databases use other symbols, such as a question mark, for truncation.

• You can expand a search by combining related terms in an "or" search expression:

"popular music" or rock or "hip hop" or rap

See the box on Boolean Logic for more about this search technique.

• If the database you are searching allows you to specify a search field (i.e. keyword, subject, author, title etc.), then you can search these fields as long as you know that the term you're using appears in that index.

For example, you might begin with a keyword search for "bearden, romare" but find that the database lists "Bearden, Romare Howard, 1911-1988" as a subject heading. By searching for "Bearden, Romare Howard, 1911-1988" as a subject, you ensure that every one of your results treats Bearden as a subject.

If you search for the keyword "bearden, romare" you might find many records among your results where Bearden is mentioned but is not the main topic of the article or book. Sometimes you may want to look at these records too, so consider keyword searching in addition to searching the subject or other index fields.

The LibX LTS Toolbar is a browser extension that gives you fast and easy access to LTS resources, including the LOUIS catalog, BrandeisScholar, the e-Journals A-Z list and more. To download the toolbar and learn more about its many features, click here.