Take Advantage of Databases
As a college student, you have a vast array of resources available to you, and many are specific to American literature or the English field. Don't limit yourself to Google! The UAlbany Libraries' database subscriptions offer more advanced search features and a wide range of free content that can help you with your courses. You can access them through the database finder on the library's website, and the links to some useful databases for American Literature are provided in the Databases page of this LibGuide.
Search Strategies in Databases
The exact search features and operators in each database may vary slightly, but there are some general principles to follow. After choosing the advanced search option, you can select fields such as author, title, and keyword. Field searching is an effective way to narrow your searches. For finding specific books, the ISBN field allows for efficient retrieval. The author field is helpful for finding works by specific American authors. Gale Literature Resource Center offers the field "Person-By or About," which would enable searches for both an author's works and criticism of them. MLA International Bibliography offers an extensive range of fields that are useful for American literature research, from dissertation info to literary theme, literary technique, and scholarly theory or discipline. You can add multiple search terms under multiple fields, and each row will be connected by a different Boolean operator.
Boolean operators include the terms OR, AND, and NOT. OR widens your search by looking for results that include one or both of your terms. AND narrows your search by only looking for results that include both terms, and NOT excludes certain terms from your search. If you were looking for works on both The Bluest Eye and Beloved, you could use AND, while OR would allow you to find works on either book. Typically, you can select these operators in a dropdown in the advanced search. You can also use them between terms in a basic search.
On the advanced search page, many databases offer useful filters. For instance, you may be able to limit searches to only books or resources published during a specific time period. Be sure to take advantage of these filters, which can help you find what you're looking for more quickly! The Literature Online database allows you to filter by form and country - for instance, you can limit the results to "American Poetry." The American Fiction database allows you to search by illustrator and limit your search to certain types of illustrated works, such as cartoons or engravings. MLA International Bibliography enables you to filter by century, genre, and language. Author gender, nationality, and ethnicity are unique filters in the Twentieth Century American Poetry database.
Another good strategy to use is truncation. The symbol varies across databases, but it's often * or #. Use this symbol to find multiple endings of a word. This can be useful to take plurals into account and for words with multiple forms, like "Modernism." In this case, the search "modernis*" would find results with the terms "Modernism" and "Modernist."
Tutorials for searching three different databases are included in the Databases section of this LibGuide.
Search Operators in Google
If you do choose to search in Google, you can exclude things from your search using the "-" operator (like the "NOT" Boolean operator). In the literary field, one surprising use for exclusion includes finding results on books that have been turned into movies. Here's an example that might be useful for finding results on the book The Wizard of Oz rather than the film:
The Wizard of Oz -film
You can also search for an exact phrase match by putting quotations around a phrase. This means Google will search for this specific phrase rather than results that simply include all the words in the phrase. This is especially useful when searching for the title of a work, as it will retrieve results with the title written exactly as searched.
To search for results from a specific website, type "site:" in front of your desired website. Here's an example:
site: youtube.com Edgar Allan Poe
This strategy could be useful for finding results in the sites listed on the Websites page of this LibGuide.
Choosing effective search terms and keywords can be difficult, and the most effective ones will depend on what you're searching for. They're ordered here based on which database you'll be searching in.
Twentieth-Century American Poetry
MLA International Bibliography, Literature Online, Gale Literature Resource Center
American Fiction, 1774-1920