Knight-Wallace Fellows
- Getting Started
- Resources by Subject
- Finding Statistics and Data Sets
- Need Help?
- Reference Management
Specialized services
The U-M Library has many specialists with a variety of expertise. Below is a selection of services and support provided:
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Digital Projects and PlanningHelp with planning and designing a digital project, digital scholarship workshops and more
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Library workshopsWorkshops and courses on a variety of topics, from technology to poster design to data.
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Data ServicesHelp with finding and manipulating data, geospatial data, visualization, text and data mining and more.
Subject Specialists
Subject Specialists provide reference support and select collection materials for a particular subject area.
They are generally the most qualified librarian to ask for help on a specialized area of research and study. Please feel free to contact them directly with any questions.
Handy tips and tricks to help you search more effectively
SEARCH TIPS for catalog search, library databases, and the web (applicable to many search engines, including Google and Google Scholar)
Phrase searching
Put phrases in quotation marks: "hurricane katrina" "social media" "campaign finance reform"
Truncation
Use an asterisk * for truncation (to find any ending of a term): communicat* will find communication, communicates, communicating, communicator, etc.
Many keywords
Many different keywords may describe the same or related concepts
- (movies, film, cinema, motion pictures)
- (refugees, migrants, asylum seekers)
Boolean "OR"
To search for ANY one of a group of terms, use OR and parentheses: (movies OR film OR cinema)
Boolean "AND"
To search for ALL terms, use AND: violence AND movies AND children
COMBINE the above strategies
violence AND (movies OR film OR cinema OR "motion pictures") AND (children OR kids OR adolescents)
Searching is iterative
To be effective and thorough, go back and try searching multiple times with many different keywords