When searching for information on your book in library databases, you'll use keyword searching. This is different from natural language searching (like in Google, where you can type in a whole sentence and Google does a pretty good job of interpreting what you mean).
- For one, databases are pretty literal and spelling titles and names correctly is a must. If I search for "Peter Mathieson" but I'm really looking for the author Peter Matthiessen, the database will tell me it doesn't have anything, even if there is a lot of stuff on Peter Matthiessen (spelled correctly).
- In additional to the title of your book, you'll probably want to search for the author's name. This is especially true in the case of a book like In Cold Blood. "In cold blood" is a pretty common phrase in the English language, so if you just search for that, you might end up with a lot of results on murder and such.
- If the author's name is not all that common, probably just the last name is sufficient. If it's a common last name (like Walker), you'll probably want to include the full name.
Looking for reviews and articles about John Krakauer's Into the Wild:
- start out typing "into the wild" into the database (using quotes searches for the title as a phrase: those words/that order)
- if that brings back a lot of results that don't pertain specifically to the book:
- then add krakauer
- if that somehow doesn't also expand that to john krakauer
