Summon Searching: Beyond the Basics

Title

Beyond the Basics with Summon: Advanced Search

What is Summon Search?

Description:

A brief introduction to advanced searching in Summon, a library search engine that includes records for books, articles, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations, videos, music, images, manuscripts, maps, and more.

Video: (Running time: 00:02:18)

Transcript:

Hello, and welcome to Summon, the service that searches many library resources at once. Let's look at some ways to go beyond basic searching in Summon.

I'm looking for scholarly articles by Caroline Bynum about women, so I type in my search terms and click the Search button.

When my search results come back, I see that some articles are about Caroline Bynum rather than by Caroline Bynum. So, I click the Advanced Search button to modify my search.

On the Advanced Search page, I can pick one or more specific fields for Summon to search. I want to search the author field for Caroline Bynum. But, I don't mind which field contains women. I'm happy with the Boolean operator AND, because I want both of these conditions to be met. I want to find articles by Caroline Bynum AND I want any of the articles' fields to contain the word women. Next, I check this box to show only scholarly materials because this is what interests me. And, I click the Search button.

I like these search results better. There are results for 33 articles by Caroline Bynum, about women. Each article has an Online indicator meaning I can click on the article to read it online now.

Now, I wonder if I can use Summon to find additional scholarly articles on my topic. So, I add results beyond my library's collection. And, now I see 34 articles instead of just 33.

Most of the articles have the orange online indicator. But, some articles [such as result #23] are marked as "Citation Online" meaning that full-text is not available. If I click on a "Citation Online" article, I'll see instructions for requesting the article from another library through ILL (interlibrary loan).

I want to read some of these articles later, so I click here to save them to my temporary folder. Now, I can export my saved citation list or email it to myself for future reference.

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