Linguistics

Finding books

Discovery Search lets you look for books at UMass Amherst and the other Five Colleges.

By default, results include resources in many different formats. To limit your results to books, find the 'Format' header on the left side of the results page and click 'Show More'. This will allow you to select 'Books' and 'eBooks'.

To find a book that you know the title of:

• Enter the title in the search box and change the accompanying dropdown to 'TI Title".
• Alternatively, if you know the book's ISBN, which is a unique number assigned to most published books, you can search for that.

To browse books without a particular title, use these tips to strengthen your searching:

Keyword Searching

Discovery Search and most other library databases are very limited in their natural language processing capabilities. Instead, results are primarily generated by matching keywords that you input with words that appear in the metadata for a resource or the text of the resource itself. Metadata is information describing the resource such as the title, author, date of publication, etc.

For example:

• ❌ What does multilingualism in Hawai'i look like?
• ✅ Hawai'i multilingualism

Boolean Searching

You can broaden or narrow your search results by connecting keywords with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), which provide a logical basis for the search engine to understand the relationship between keywords in your search.

• AND - narrows your results; both terms on either side of AND must be present
• OR - expands your results; at least one term on either side of OR must be present; useful for connecting synonyms or related words
• NOT - eliminates items; the term following NOT must not be present

For example:

• Hawai'i AND multilingualism
• multilingualism OR multilingual
• Hawai'i NOT Japanese

Linguistics ebook databases