Religion 209A & B: Introduction to Feminist Theology

Shortening your keywords --  You can search words with a common root by "truncating" them with an *.

For example,

christian*  will search christians, christianity, christianization, and so on.

Keeping words in phrases together -- It's important to keep words in phrases together to keep them in context.  For example,

"Christian Scientist" would bring up items concerning the religous denomination known as The Church of Christ, Scientist, or Christian Science. 

If you didn't use the quotation marks you might end up with items about scientists and their relationship to Christianity intermingled with books about Christian Science.

Keywords are the words that occur to you that describe your topic.  For example:  women spirituality.  Notice -- the less important words like:  an, in, the, of  are left out of the statement.  Every word you ask for has to be present in the item you're retrieving, so just use the words you really need.

Subject links are provided by the Library of Congress cataloging librarians to describe your topic consistently.  Making use of them will focus your search and uncover things that a simple keyword search may have missed.

Here are some examples of some relevant subject links or subject headings in Catalyst:

• Feminist theology
• Feminist theology -- Asia
• Mujerista theology
• African American women -- Religious life
• Feminist criticism
• Women in the Catholic Church
• Women -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
• Women and religion
• Womanist theology

So, your best searching technique in library catalogs would be to:

1. Search using keywords to find at least one item of interest
2. Use the subject links to find other items the Library of Congress librarians deemed to be about your topic even if the exact words weren't used in the title

When you use a huge catalog like WorldCat, it's good to search using subject terms you identified in Catylist rather than by keyword.

Sometimes going to the area of the library where books on a particular topic are shelved and just looking around makes sense.  You may stumble across books that you might not have found by searching Catalyst.  Here is a chart that identifies some areas you might want to browse: