 In this video, you'll learn some useful keyword and search tips for conducting research on Latin America and the Caribbean at Tulane University Libraries. Library search is the primary discovery tool for Tulane University Libraries. You can access it from the homepage library.tulane.edu. Library search pulls in many library resources into a single search. You can use it to find items in both Tulane's library catalog and subscription databases, including books and ebooks, articles, newspapers, encyclopedias, and more. Let's say you're doing a research project on Black feminist movements in the Dominican Republic. You can try out your main keywords to start, like Black feminist movements, Dominican Republic. A search like this will look for items that have all of these terms, Black and feminist and movements and Dominican and Republic in the record. We got 16 results, which is manageable, but perhaps too limited depending on how widely we want to explore and then further refine our project. Let's try some search techniques that will give us a broader sense of resources available. It's always a good idea to use the advanced search function to narrow or expand your results. Most academic databases have an advanced search feature, so you can apply what you learn here to others like JSTOR, Google Scholar, and more. We can use what are called Boolean operators and, or, and not, and other tricks to maximize results. First, let's separate out our terms. In the first line, I'll search for Black as a racialized identity and related concepts. I'm going to do an OR search, which needs to be included in parentheses in this database, and try Black, OR, Afro, OR, any GR with a question mark. This expands my search beyond Black to find results that use similar or synonymous terms. First, Afro will search any word, including Afro as a prefix, like Afro-Dominican, Afro-Dominicans, Afro-Dominicano, Afro-Dominicana, Afro-Descendant, etc. Next, any GR with a question mark will search for Negro, Negra, and gender diverse endings like Negre or Negrix. Note that the question mark functions as a wildcard. In the next line, I want to also include feminism and related concepts. I'm going to search feminists with an asterisk. This is called a truncated search, so it will include all terms that start with feminists like feminism, feminismo, feminist, feminista, etc. Finally, in the third line, I'll specify the geographic location I'm researching. I'm going to put Dominican Republic in quotation marks to ensure that it's searched as a phrase and not separate words, or República Dominicana in quotation marks for the same reason. Note that it's not necessary to capitalize proper nouns, and it doesn't matter if you put the accent or tiende on Spanish terms or not. The search will come out the same. Phrase searching with quotation marks works in most databases, including Google, and it's an essential strategy to use when researching. Note that I'm connecting all three search lines with AND so that every result incorporates terms relating to blackness and feminism and the Dominican Republic. As opposed to 16, we got 81 results, many of which seem promising for the project. But if we wanted to expand even more to see what happens, we could search just for feminism in the Dominican Republic and take out the first line. This will include resources that cover a variety of feminist movements. Some of this will include black feminist movements, but may not be described as such in the resource record. Finally, let's say you're only looking for scholarly publications and not newspaper articles. You can limit your results using the filters to the left. To conclude, remember that research is an iterative process. There will always be trial and error when searching for academic resources. It's important to test out some keyword combinations, then try new ones based on the results you get. And also, don't forget to open the resource record of something you're interested in. Look at the subject headings that catalogers and indexers use, and then use that information to refine your keywords. So for example, here we see women is an important keyword that we didn't try. I hope you found this video helpful for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research at Tulane. For further research support, email lol at tulane.edu.