Prince George's Community College

301 Largo Road
Largo, Maryland 20774

The online catalog can be searched by Keyword, Subject/Author/Title, Boolean Keyword, or Guided Keyword. When you do not know the title or an author of a book or item, you may want to begin with a Keyword search.

The Keyword tab will come up as the default tab when search is selected and will be in bold. Notice that you can enter keywords as a phrase in double quotations (""), enter essential words with a plus (+) in front of them, use an asterisk (*) in front of important words, and truncate (?) for variant spellings. Use the keywords from the statement: What is the relationship between counter terrorism and United States intelligence operations? If you are unsuccessful in getting hits, think of alternate concepts and type them. Type your search terms(s) in the text box such as+terrorism +"united states" +intelligence and Enter or click Do Search. The screens below has a search strategy and the titles retrieved, and a holding screen from the keyword strategy.

Another search strategy for locating titles when you do not have a title or an author is to do a Boolean search strategy using AND, OR, NOT. Connect terms by typing Boolean Operators in upper case. Nest or group common terms together in parentheses such as (terrorism AND prevention) AND (united AND states).

Click the Subject/Author/Title tab to search by these methods. To enter a title, type as much as the title or the complete title such as terrorism and democracy. To search by an author, enter the last name first, space, and then the first name if you know it. The following is an example of a title search.