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Hello, my name is Alex, I'm a librarian at the University of Alabama
and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to use the HathiTrust's basic search to find books
and other materials
The HathiTrust's homepage is relatively simple
it contains one search box that you can use for basic searches
One thing to point out though is that there are two types of basic searches
a catalog search, and a full-text search
As you can see, the full-text search has just a basic search box
but the catalog search has a basic search box and search filters
like "all fields," "title," "author," and "subject."
Both search modes give you the option of looking for full-view only volumes
titles that can be read in full and downloaded. The default is that this box is checked.
Now let's start with a catalog search
One reason to use the catalog search is if you're looking for something specific
if you're looking for a specific book, or books by a specific author
For example, if you want to find titles by William Shakespeare
you could type in the search term "William Shakespeare"
and use the search filter drop down menu to choose "author"
As you can see, there are over 3,000 results that are available in full-view
To read any of these books, all you'll need to do is click on the "full-view" button.
On the left-hand side of the screen are a number of limiters
basically ways to make your search more specific
For example, you could search for books and other materials in a certain language, in this case
we'll choose English
And now our search only finds titles that were written in English
You could also limit your search to a certain publication date
Or you could even look for a type of format
such as books, biographies, and even dictionaries
The full-text search is a broader way of searching for materials
Here when you put in a search term such as "William Shakespeare"
the database looks for volumes about Shakespeare and titles written by Shakespeare
It also searches within the text of all the items in the HathiTrust to find references to Shakespeare
What this means is that this type of search might find references to William Shakespeare
within a book that wasn't obviously or specifically about Shakespeare
Because of that you'll find a much larger amount of titles than when you use the catalog search
Now you'll see that we found over 430,000 results
and that's just titles that are available in full-text
As you can see, the first few results are all books about Shakespeare
However, you could use the author search filter on the left-hand side of the screen
to find titles that were written by Shakespeare
The rest of the search filters on the left-hand side of the screen are the same as they were in the catalog search
One way to explain what we mean when we say that the full-text search finds references to William
Shakespeare
within books that weren't obviously about Shakespeare
is to click on one of the subject limiters on the left-hand side of the screen
You could, for example, look for William Shakespeare as the subject
but let's click on another subject, one that doesn't seem as obvious - Science, for example
When we do that the first book we find doesn't seem to be about Shakespeare at all
but we should be able to find references to Shakespeare within the full-text, let's click on the
full-view to see if we can
One interesting feature in the HathiTrust is that you can do a keyword search
within a certain volume - in this case the search box automatically has William Shakespeare as the
search term
When we click on it we should find references to our subject
And we do. You can even click a link to go to a certain page where a reference to Shakespeare was made
Hopefully now you have a good understanding of how to find HathiTrust materials using a basic
search
Just keep in mind that the catalog search is probably best when you're looking for something
specific - a certain book or books by a certain author
while the full-text search is a more comprehensive way of searching the collection