Effective Searching

When search­ing, it’s good to keep a few things in mind.

  1. Try lots of dif­fer­ent terms. “Sylvia Beach let­ters” will pro­duce dif­fer­ent results than “Sylvia Beach correspondence”.
  2. The more words you use in your search, the fewer results will come back to you. “Woodrow Wil­son” will pro­duce fewer results than “Wil­son”, but not all of the Wilsons that are pro­duced may be about Woodrow.
  3. Using a minus sign (-) will exclude a term from results. If you’re inter­ested in Ray Stan­nard Baker, but you keep get­ting results for James A. Baker III, a good search might be “Ray Baker –James”.