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Geography: Search Strategies

Where to Find What:

Not sure how to find hardcopy books and videos, ebooks, streaming online videos, scholarly articles, databases, and more? Here's your brief guide:

Finding books, ebooks, articles, videos, multimedia, and more:

Searching the library catalog by Geography is the most general way to start. You'll get a mix of books, films, and other materials from the library catalog.


This “Geography” search is a good starting point, but it will yield too many results for most situations. You’ll see “Narrow by Tag” option as well as other search suggestions with many more choices for steering your “Geography” search results in a more specific direction.


To zero in on your research area, you’ll need to use the “narrow by tag” option to focus in more, or search specifically with other search terms for very specialized aspects.


The search terms in the box on the right are more specific. Search any of them, or even search terms of your own. From there, you can further narrow down results by additional search tags, library locations, and types of materials (left side of your screen).

Tip: search terms like these are also useful for finding articles and other online resources in the library’s databases.