QuickSearch   Tags: discovery, interdisciplinary, quicksearch, summon  

Purpose

QuickSearch provides a single search box to find books and articles across most of the library's collections.  It is powered by Summon, a web-scale discovery service from Serial Solutions. QuickSearch is not a replacement for discipline-specific research databases, rather it is intended as an easy-to-use alternative to Google for library research.

Coverage

QuickSearch is a central index of as much of library content as possible so that it is available in a single search engine. It includes over 170 million items:

• The entire library catalog (over 1 million items)
• Approximately 80% of the journal collection (over 60,000 subscriptions)
• Most of the ebook content (over 200,000 book titles and chapters)
• Other resources like archival & research guides, music, newspapers, videos...

Look for the icon on Databases A-Z and Ebooks to see what specific resources are in QuickSearch. To see if a specific journal is in QuickSearch, go to Advanced Search and use the from this publication box to search by journal title.

Problems

QuickSearch is a beta project that is not yet fully mature.  As such, it has several known issues and limitations:

• It does not include all library content and subscriptions.
• It searches the full text of content when available, which is much broader than traditional database searching.  Use Advanced Search and query language to construct narrower searches.
• Retrieving  a full-text article can sometimes fail due to discrepancies in citation information bewteen vendors.  If you have trouble retrieving content, use Ask a Librarian to request help, we can usually find it for you in another source.

Browsable

You don't have to enter any search terms, just click search and see the +170 million results. 

Facets

Narrow results by using facets.  Click on 'more...' under a facet to get a pop-up with include/exclude checkboxes.

Abstracts

Mouse over the title or click on the magnifying glass next to the title for a pop-up with a description and an abstract when available.

Folders

Use the folder icon next to the title to temporarily save items.  Go to the 'saved items' folder to print, email, export  to refworks, etc.

Persistent Links

Save a search by copying the URL in the browser address bar,  The URL can be emailed, embedded in Blackboard, bookmarked, etc.

Search Alerts

Use the RSS icon  to add a feed for notification when new content is added that meets the search criteria.

Advanced Search

Use Advanced Search to narrow to words in title or a specific author or journal publication. 

Help

Check out Help page for tips on phrase searching, boolean, field limiters, and wildcards.

Results Beyond the Library

Use the ' Add results beyond your library's collection' to search all +600 million items known to Summon.  Click on the title of the citation to place an interlibrary loan.

No Login

No login required to search from off campus, only required to retrieve subscription content.  Great for guest researchers.