To search for books, ebooks, films, government documents, and other items in the ZSR Library collection, use our library catalog, also called Primo.  To search for journal articles, you will want to go to our databases page and select a database based upon the subject you are researching.

Basic Search

Use this option when you have a simple search or know the specific item you are looking for, such as the name of a book or all the books we have by a certain author:

Advanced Search:

The advanced search page will allow you to do more complicated searches, use synonyms or multiple terms, and make the best use of search methods such as truncation:

In the search above:

• the search phrase wom* OR fem* OR gender* allows the searcher to find results that include the words: woman, women, female, females, feminine, feminist, gender, genders, gendered, gendering, etc...  The asterisk at the end of each root is the truncation symbol, which will return results that contain that root with any endings. 
• the OR between each term means that any of those terms is acceptable in the results, as long as one of them is present.  OR will broaden and increase your search results.  If AND was used instead, than all three words would have to be present, which would narrow the search and reduce the number of search results. 
• the quotation marks in the second search box indicate to search those words together as a phrase rather than individually. 
• when looking at the results of this search, you will see these phrases and versions of the search terms appearing in book titles, chapter titles, and subject headings.

For both types of search, make sure you select to search the "Library Catalog" rather than "Everything" to limit your search results to books, ebooks, films, etc...