Library Guide for Humanities 1P50

Getting Started

Omni is your academic search tool. It provides enhanced discovery of information resources at Brock Libraries, our partner institutions, and beyond. With Omni, you can search for and access books, articles, maps, music, and other resources in print and digital formats.

Sign-In with your Brock email address and password to:

• Search for scholarly literature
• Renew borrow items
• Check loans and make requests
• Access full text scholarly literature online
• View search history and create alerts
• Access My Favourites

Adapted from Omni Search Tips by Cory Laverty, Information Services Librarian, Queen's University Library.

These search tips work for most library databases such as Omni. The first one does not work in Google (yet?).

To search for multiple words that start from the same root, use a truncation symbol:

• geograph* will search for geography, geographer, geographical, geographies, etc.

To search for synonyms or multiple options, use OR:

• ontario OR quebec; space OR spatial; house OR apartment
• be sure to use uppercase text for OR in Omni! 

To search for an exact phrase, put it in double quotation marks:

• "climate change"

To combine these techniques, separate the components of your search with parentheses:

• canad* and ("climate change" or "natural disaster")
• (canad* and "climate change") or "natural disaster"
• How are those two searches different?

When you have a list of results from Omni or another library database, the first step is to interpret the big picture. There's a lot of information crammed into the search results list, so pause here and apply your critical reading skills to see what you have.

• number of search results
• kinds of sources: academic journals, magazines, books, videos, etc.
• order of results: usually the default is by relevance, which means those that appear to be most relevant come first. You can change this to date order.
• subjects (depending on the number of results, you may be able to see the most common subjects from a list in the left column in Omni. Not all library databases can do this.)
• titles & abstracts: skim the article titles and abstracts in your results list to get a sense of whether your results are about the same topic you were trying to find
• Click on a title to see detailed information about the particular article.