Creating More Powerful Searches

There are many different types of comics and graphic novels, in both fiction and nonfiction! Our collections include a wide variety for you to choose from in Du Bois. We even have a graphic medicine collection you can visit in the Science and Engineering Library. If you have general questions about the graphic novel collections at UMass Libraries, check out the Graphic Novels and Comics guide. 

You can see all the kinds of comics available to read in the Genre List maintained by the Library of Congress. Some of my favorites are:

• Biographical comics
• Fotonovelas (stories where photographs are used in a comic books style, sometimes in conjunction with drawings)
• Historical comics (fictional comics set in a recognizable time period prior to when they were written)
• Magic realism comics (comics with fantastic or mythical elements in a realistic narrative)
• Paranormal comics
• Psychological comics (in which the emotions and thoughts of the characters are of equal or greater interest than the actual narrative)
• Road trip comics
• Slice-of-life comics (comics about normal people and everyday life)
• Social issue comics
• Thriller comics

It's helpful to learn what you like! You can use these genre terms above (and from the hyperlinked list) and use Discovery to search for them the same as you can search for subjects. Check out some advanced search strategies below!

Knowing the terms for the different genre can allow you to refine your searches. Here is the best way to use these terms in Discovery:

• Go to library.umass.edu and select Advanced Search, which you see in red under the search box.

• Type a genre term into the top search box. For this search, we'll try out nonfiction comics!
• Select SU Subject Terms from the dropdown menu at the right.
• Press enter

After we search for our term, there are a few other tweaks we can do to make our search relevant and more useful.

• On the left side of the screen, you'll see a long bar that says Refine Results. In the very first box at the top of that bar, it says "Find all my search terms" and it shows your term. Below that, it says Limiters.
• Go to the X next to where it says "Limit to Five College Catalog/UMass electronic subscriptions."
• Click on the X to get rid of that limiter. We do not want that limiter.

• Next, continue scrolling down the page and looking at that bar on the left side.
• Find the section that says Library Location.
• Check the box next to UMass Du Bois Library. In this example, you see that we have 138 titles in Du Bois Library that we say are nonfiction comics. Alternatively, you could select the UMass Science & Engineering Library that you see further down the list. It shows you that there are 71 nonfiction comics in the collections at that library.

This isn't a perfect science, and we are always working to improve the descriptive metadata about our resources. But this method will always get you to a great starting point!

If you know the exact title you are looking for, you can target that directly in your search.

• Go to library.umass.edu and select Advanced Search, which you see in red under the search box.
• Type your title into the top search box. You don't need to capitalize words and you can use just the first part of the title. In the example below, I want to read Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story.
• Select TI Title from the dropdown menu at the right.
• Press enter

You'll see you get an exact match!

If you are looking for a title that's just a common word, don't forget that you can add other search terms in the other search boxes. For example, if you want to read any of the March books by John Lewis, that might be tough to find with just a title search. You can add "lewis" as a search term and select AU Author from the drop down menu. You can also always filter by library location like you see in the example for "nonfiction comics" above.