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To do a Simple Search of the Clearinghouse contents, simply type a word or series of words into the textbox in the upper left corner of each page. This search will look for your term(s) in all of the text of the Clearinghouse records and return the results.
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To perform a more complex search, you can choose the Advanced Search option. Use the drop-down menus to select Title, Author, or Subjects or keep the default Keyword to search in multiple fields at once. To learn more about the Subjects field, see "Using the Subjects." More detail about what each search field includes can be found in the chart below.
Boolean Phrases
You can add as many text boxes as you need to build your Boolean phrase by clicking on > Add Another Row.
Using the Subjects
Subjects describe facets of a document's content. To add Subjects to your search string, check off the boxes next to terms you want and click the Add these terms to my search button. By default, the search form will combine these terms with the Boolean OR.
Hint: A document about African-American faculty, for example, will be assigned the descriptors Race/ethnicity and Faculty, and would be a result in a Subject search for Faculty, a search for Race/ethnicity, or a search for Race/ethnicity AND Faculty. Doing a keyword search that includes African-American, or its variations, as a term would also yield results. Since keyword searching includes content from the abstract for a record, it is sometimes a good idea to combine keyword searching with Subject searches using a Boolean OR to maximize your results.
A thesaurus has been created to show the relationships between and definitions of Subject terms. You can access the Thesaurus by clicking here or following the link in the Subjects list on the Search page.
To make your search more specific, you can select particular dates and media types.
After you have performed a search, you can browse your results, look at individual records by clicking on their titles, and/or download a bibliography of your results.
After you have performed a search, you can revise it by clicking on the > Revise search link at the top of the Search Results page. You will be returned to the Search page with the fields populated by your original search terms and you can delete, edit, and add to those terms.
After you have performed a search, the Results page will list Subjects related to those in your results list. These Related Subjects can be used to broaden your current search or serve as a springboard for a new search.
Alternately, you can broaden a Subject search by combining it with keywords of your choice using a Boolean OR.
