Divinity Research Tutorial

1. How can I find books on my topic?

This section of the research tutorial focuses on using Yale's online catalog to locate an overview of the terminology, major issues, and historical background of your topic.

ORBIS is Yale's online public access catalog, a joint catalog for all Yale libraries (except Law). It contains records for about 98% of the Divinity Library's holdings, but a smaller percentage of holdings from elsewhere in the Yale University Library system. Records for many books acquired before 1971 by other libraries at Yale have not yet been entered into the online catalog. Orbis contains records for books and the titles of journals; it does not contain records for specific journal articles or specific chapters within books.

Click here for a guide to using Orbis (then use the back button on your browser to return to this page), or Scroll down for tips on researching a specific topic in Orbis.

Keyword Searching

For some topics, you may need to go to an encyclopedia or other reference work first to get a general sense of the relevant background and issues. The Divinity Library's Research Guide for Christianity includes information about numerous encyclopedias, or you can utilize the word "encyclopedias" in the keyword searching techniques described below to locate relevant works.

When researching a topic like prayer in the public schools in Orbis, it is often best to start with a keyword search. Depending on how you construct this search, you may get too many records or not quite enough, but you can use information in the records you retrieve to refine your search.

To get an idea of the Yale's holdings in the area of prayer in public schools, click here to connect to Orbis, type prayer and public and school? in the box and select Keyword as your type of search:

In our keyword search, "school" is truncated by placing a "?" at the end of the word. Truncating certain words makes keyword searching more efficient because it will find variant forms of a word, e.g, school, schools and/or schooling.

Limiting by library location is another keyword searching technique that is sometimes useful; To limit by location, click on the "More Limits" button:

Then choose "Divinity" from the list of collection locations:

Your keyword search should have resulted in several "hits". Each number in the far left column of the results page links to a bibliographic record in which the words prayer and public and school are found. You can sort your list of results by publication date if you want to see the most recent material available:

At this point, depending on what aspect of prayer in public schools you decide to pursue, you can refine your search. A good way to refine your search is to use the subject headings attached to the records you found through your keyword search. Select an item of interest in the results list by clicking on the number to the left of the entry, which will reveal a brief view of the record, including subject headings (click on the Long View button at the top of the screen to see more information about an item). The TITLES button on the top of the page will return you to the results list.

If you looked through the first few records it is likely that you saw both religion in the public schools and prayer in the public schools listed as subject headings.

Subject Searching

Click here to re-enter Orbis, and do a subject search. Change the search category from "keyword" to "subject", then type in religion in the public schools or prayer in the public schools.

If there is a subject heading that fits your topic well you can click on that subject heading in a record and Orbis will automatically perform a subject search.

The Next Step

Books are important resources for research, but sometimes you need more current or specific information that may be available only in journal articles. Go to Part 2 for information on finding articles.