OneSearch is Adelphi University Libraries’ comprehensive search tool. It provides simple, one-step discovery for a variety of materials, both print and electronic, including books, journal articles, newspapers and magazines, web resources, videos, and more.
❓ Do I Need to Sign in to Use OneSearch?
You do not need to log in to use OneSearch; however, signing in provides advantages including:
- Status of your loans, requests, fines and fees, blocks, messages, and other information about your library account.
- Ability to request physical resources to be held at the Single Service Point, shipped to your home address in the continental United States, or digitized and delivered electronically.
- Get better information about full-text availability, loan/renewal lengths, and more.
- Save records and search results for later use or export to citation management software.
- Personalize your results by selecting preferred disciplines.
- Change your display language.
Quick Search Guide
Search Scope
You can define the scope of your search to get the results most appropriate to your needs. When you type any search term you will see several options.
- Everything (default): Search everything the Libraries have access to, using data from both Adelphi Libraries and elsewhere. This includes information about journal articles, book chapters, and other details within works.
- Library Catalog: Search the Libraries’ own information about our holdings. This contains the most accurate information compiled by Adelphi librarians, but does not go down to the article or chapter level.
- Streaming Media: Search videos or audio recordings to which we have access.
- Course Reserves: Search materials that are available through course reserves.
Expand your scope
If you don’t find what you are looking for, try selecting the “Expand beyond Adelphi Holdings” option in the search results sidebar. From there you can request items through Interlibrary Borrowing.
Tips for Keyword Searching
The following features apply to text fields in both Simple and Advanced search.
Operators
Operators (In all caps as shown) allow you to refine your search by combining terms.
| AND | Search for results with both terms. This is the default operator for multiple search terms and is usually not necessary. Example: civil AND war (or just civil war) |
| OR | Search for results with either (or both) terms. Example: civil OR war |
| NOT | Exclude the term after the operator. Example: civil NOT war |
Wildcards
| ? | Match one character Example: dr?ve (matches drive, drove) |
| * | Match multiple characters Example: cultur* (matches culture, cultural, culturally) |
Grouping
| " " | Quotation marks group terms to be matched as a phrase. Example: “Shakespearean tragedy” (only matches records containing the exact phrase) |
| ( ) | Use parentheses to group terms together in conjunction with operators. Example: Shakespeare AND (tragedy OR sonnet) |
Get Help
Library faculty and staff are available by chat, phone, email, or in person to help with research questions.
Go to Ask a Librarian (available from the top of any OneSearch page), where you can get help about your account, find guides and FAQs on specific topics, and contact a librarian with expertise in your subject area to meet online or in person. You can also drop by Swirbul’s 1st floor Service Point.