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SPC 1608 - Stein (Dale Mabry): Library catalog discovery search

Links and tips to help you find acceptable sources for your Informative Briefing and Persuasive Presentation speeches.

Search Primo, the library catalog discovery tool

Find books, articles, videos, & more

For best results, be sure you are signed in!

Example searches

  • residential housing AND (community college* OR two-year college*)
    • Filtered by Availability Peer-Reviewed Journals and Publication Date From 2020 to 2025.
    • Using *truncation to search multiple endings of a word, see Page 3 of your class handout.
    • Using Boolean operators, see Page 3 of your class handout.
  • first generation college students AND college success
    • Filtered to just Resource Type  Articles and Publication Date From 2020 to 2025.
    • By not filtering by Peer-Reviewed Journals, the education-specific keywords cause articles from Trade journals, which are like magazines for members of specific fields, to populate the results as well as articles from Peer-Reviewed Journals.

Start with good key words

Quick tips

  • Library search tools often work best with just the most important, or key, words, and not long sentences or phrases.
    • One exception might be if the long sentence or phrase is the known title of a work you are hunting down.
  • Try writing out how you would describe your topic to a friend, then pick the key words.
  • Leave out words such as cause, effect, and comparison, unless these are part of a known title or technical term. 

This video demonstrates how to pick good key words:

Some keyword ideas to get you started

Here are some example search terms you might try, depending on your topic:

  • STEM transfer
  • Business marketing careers
  • Veterans student affairs
  • Athletes student affairs
  • Criminal justice education
  • Mental health counseling
  • Career counseling
  • Academic advising 

Try combining your search terms with other keywords that may help to focus your resutls, such as the following:

  • college students
  • community college

Also, listen

Listen closely to the HCC staff member you interview. You may pick up keywords to use from what they tell you.

Tutorials for using the library discovery search

Often called the library catalog or by its software name, Primo, the Library discovery search, is a one-stop search engine for journal, magazine, and newspaper articles, as well as books and eBooks, videos, digital media, and more. It also has tools to help you save and cite what you find.