 Hi, I'm Rachel Stein, Research and Instruction Librarian at the Latin American Library at Tulane University. This video will address one of the most frequent questions I get from students researching Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal. What language should I use when I'm looking for academic sources? English, Spanish, Portuguese, any other language spoken in those regions, or for that matter, any other language that I can read in. The short answer is, all of the above. Try different keyword combinations in English and any other language you can work in, but it's essential to understand the advantages and drawbacks of searching in English versus other languages to get the best results. In this video, I'll demonstrate a library search in English and then Spanish, so you can see exactly what goes on when you search in different languages. To start my search, I've gone to my library's homepage, library.tulane.edu. If you're at another institution, you can try following along with your local library catalog, even though the display and search options will be different. I'm going to start by clicking on the Advanced Search button to see all my options. The sample research topic I'm going to use today is Arab Immigration in Latin America. I hope that I'm limiting my search to books for the purposes of this exercise. That said, when you go to do an article search, whether here or in another academic database, many of the takeaways I'll be discussing will be the same. I'd like to try a first search intuitively and then adapt my keywords as I discover what terms catalogers use to describe the material and based on what did or did not work. I'm going to take a stab at the keywords Arab and immigration and Latin America. Notice that I'm searching any field instead of title or subject to cast as wide a net as possible. Using the end between search lines is going to ensure that the result will include all of my search terms. You can see that I got 10 results, some in English and some in Spanish. One is even in French and some are definitely more relevant than others. Let's look at the first hit which is highly relevant for my project and see what we can learn from the catalog record. To start, the title is in Spanish. This means that when I do a keyword search for Spanish terms in the library catalog, I will get results that have my keywords in the title. Notice that my search picked up on America with an accent even though I didn't include an accent mark in my English search for America. This tells me that the search will pick up on a word with the same spelling, whether or not it has accent marks or other diacritics, so that's helpful to keep in mind. Just below, the subjects are in English, not Spanish. This is because at Tulane and most US libraries, the cataloging is done in English. These subject keywords, which librarians call subject headings, are absolutely essential to look at when you're doing a search. They tell you what terms catalogers use to describe and categorize materials. You can click on any of these links to see books on similar topics which have the same subject headings. Or you can jot down these keywords and go back and try a new search with different combinations of keywords. I can see that all of the keywords that I searched, Arab, immigration, and Latin America, are included somewhere in the subject field and you can see them highlighted in yellow. That's why my English keywords resulted in this book appearing, even though the book is in Spanish. Continuing down to the bottom of the record, the catalogers have opted to include the table of contents. This won't always be the case, but it's incredibly helpful when it is. If you use Spanish keywords in a library search and the record includes a table of contents in Spanish, the search engine will pick up on your keywords in that part of the record as well. Now let's go back and try a keyword search in Spanish and see how the results are different. I'm going to build a search similar to my first one using any field because I now know that a subject search would have to be in English. I'm going to try immigration, Arabic, and Latin America. You can see I only got two results, much fewer than before, but now we know why. It's because the search is only picking up on information in the title and table of contents and not the subjects that are catalogued in English. Based on this, we can conclude that searching in Spanish may be more limiting because it won't account for subject keywords. On the other hand, though, my Spanish search gave me much more targeted results. These two books are highly relevant to my project because the keywords I used are all in the book's titles. To conclude, what did you learn from this video? What are your major conclusions and takeaways? I encourage you to pause the video and jot your ideas down before I share my own. I hope you came away with three major conclusions. First, remember what's behind your search. The title and table of contents of a catalog record will be in Spanish if the book is in Spanish and the same goes for any language other than English. You may also find author's names, publication information, and summaries in the language in which the book was written in the catalog record. Meanwhile, in every single catalog record with Tulane and at any library where cataloging is done in English, the subject headings will always be in English. Second, use dynamic keyword strategies. Test out different combinations of keywords in each language to maximize results. And after you do an intuitive search, look to see what subject keywords catalogers use and adapt your terms accordingly. Third and finally, think critically about what's behind an information search. This is a big picture conclusion. Once you understand what goes into a catalog or database search, you'll get more effective at finding relevant sources for your project. It's a general rule of thumb when looking for information. I hope this video was helpful. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to email lalatulane.edu. Check out our website and follow us on Facebook and Instagram for more information about the Latin American Library. Thank you for your time.