• Be Specific for best results, e.g. photography during the civil war, not just civil war. 


• Refine your search

  Use the facets on the left to: 

  •  target only peer reviewed articles 

  •  show only items with fulltext available online 

  •  include/exclude newspaper articles, books, journal articles, dissertations, and more 

  •  limit your results by date, language, format or subject

• Expand your search

  Mark the facet on the left labeled "Add results beyond your library's catalog" to search more places and include items not found in the UM Library collection.  For items not available in the Mansfield Library collection, click on the title and scroll down to "Request the article from another library" to place an interlibrary loan (ILL) request.
  

What do you think of the new "Search Everything" box?

What am I searching?

"Search Everything" searches about 75% of the library's journal content (99% of the library's peer-reviewed journal content), the library catalog, and the library's collection of digitized material. So, you are searching peer-reviewed journal articles, books, DVDs, newspapers, and much more.

How does it work?

Librarians worry that describing the details of search engines and search systems is like describing how sausage is made (no one really wants to know), but it's very cool. The library has a contract with the company Serial Solutions. Serial Solutions set up arrangements with most of the major journal and periodical publishers to get detailed information about individual articles. In addition, the library sent Serial Solutions the records from our catalog and records for our digital collections. The vendor pulls all this data together, normalizes it, and indexes it into a single database they call Summon.

So, when you search in "Search Everything," your query goes to a single database and rapidly brings back results. Then, you can refine on the fly with the facets and tools in the left toolbar.

How is this different/better than the old search engine?

The library listened to feedback about the prior search engine, and we heard that it was too slow, some searches timed out, sorting by relevance was not working, and many results didn't seem relevant at all. While the previous search engine for the library sent queries to multiple databases and combined results as they were retrieved, a query in the "Search Everything" box goes to a single place--this makes it much faster. Also, since the search goes to a single, pre-indexed database, you can get more control over your searching (e.g., using quotation marks works uniformly for phrase searching, Boolean searching works consistently), which did not work reliably in the previous search tool. All of this leads to better relevance ranking in search results.

We continue to want to hear your feedback about the new search engine so that we can make refinements and choose our next search function wisely. We have heard the interest in subject-specific searches (searching across MLA, JSTOR, ABELL, and Humanities Index for literature, for instance). We cannot create that search at this time, but we will keep that functionality in mind as we look for the next iteration of the search tool. In the meantime, you can get more subject-specific results by including more terms in your initial search, by selecting specific subjects in the left tool-bar, and by limiting to specific content types. As always, you will get the greatest control over your searches by searching specific databases directly. "Search Everything" is a useful starting-point search and great for finding sources not covered in your "usual suspects" databases in a short amount of time.

How do I get to the full text?

Click on the title of what you want. If it is an article, the system routes you to available full-text (made available through the library's subscriptions to article databases and e-journal packages). Sometimes we only carry the journal in print or there is an error, in which case you will be directed to the library's Journals page. If the item you want is a book, the system should send you to the library catalog to get current availability and the call number.

I'm getting too much--how do I narrow it down?

• Refine your search

  Use the facets on the left to: 

  •  target only peer reviewed articles 

  •  show only items with fulltext available online 

  •  include/exclude newspaper articles, books, journal articles, dissertations, and more 

  •  limit your results by date, language, format or subject

• Be Specific for best results, e.g. photography during the civil war, not just civil war. Because you are searching across so many resources, you can be more specific in your initial search. Or, you can re-run your search with more keywords.

How does this differ from Google Scholar?

It's a similar principle, where you send a search to a single database of content pooled from publishers. Google gathers scholarly content from publishers, as Serial Solutions (the vendor of our "Search Everything" search) does. However, Google Scholar does not include books, the library's digital collections, and non-scholarly (but potentially relevant) articles from trade magazines, newspapers, and other sources. As with Search Everything, Google Scholar can link you through to the full text if the Mansfield Library has subscribed to the content for campus.

How do I get to a specific database?

You can always get to a specific database through the Database A-Z list or through a subject guide.

Am I really searching everything?

Maybe not quite everything. This was the closest (and shortest) way we could describe the experience. There are some databases and research tools that are not yet indexed in "Search Everything" (and we are working on pulling together a list of those resources so you can see what's not in there), and that's partly why direct access to databases will always be maintained. You can get to a specific resource at any time through the A to Z List or through the subject guides.

Search Everything covers the whole library catalog, 75% of the library's journal content (99% of the library's peer-reviewed journal content), and lots of digital content.