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R-Search User Guide

This is a guide for using the library's Primo interface, sometimes known as R-Search or the library catalog. This system allows you to search nearly all of our resources in print and online.

The R-Search Landing Page

The R-Search landing page offers a variety of search options, including the main search box, advanced search, journal search, and newspaper search.  There is also an option to browse rather than search.  We will discuss each of these below.

When you type your search term(s) into the search box, a list of search scopes will appear beneath the search box.  "Everything" is the default search method and is the most similar to Google in how it functions, which means it will usually return a massive number of results.  You can use the scopes below to only search particular types of content in R-Search:

  • Everything - searches all items in the catalog
     
  • Books, Films, and More - searches items physically available in the library as well as e-books
     
  • Articles - searches articles available online (scholarly and popular)
     
  • Course Reserves - searches materials placed on reserve by Rollins faculty

Clicking New Search at the top of the page will start you with a fresh search and clear any scopes of filters you have used.

Course Reserves can be searched by class title in addition to searching for specific items.

There is an area underneath the scopes that populates suggested searches based on what you type in the search box:

Journal Search

The R-Search Journal Search feature is conveniently located in the top menu above the search box.  You can use this to specifically search for journals, which includes peer-reviewed, scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers.

You can search by title or the ISSN.  If you're not sure of the title, sometimes searching for a keyword that is likely to be in the title helps, such as searching for "medicine" to find a medical journal.  

The ISSN is the International Standard Serial Number, which is a unique alphanumeric code that identifies a particular journal.  If you aren't sure of a particular ISSN but would like to look it up, you can do so here.

In addition to searching, you can browse journal titles by clicking the number and letter links below the journal search box.  Each letter lists all journals which have titles starting with that letter.

Journal searching retrieves online publications and print ones that are available in the library on the 1st floor.  An example of a journal available as electronic and print is pictured below:

Browse

The Browse feature is also available from the top menu.  This feature allows you to find materials in several ways:

  • Subject - searches by particular topics such as history or folklore, and breaks down the topic into sub-topics.  For example, folklore could be broken down into folklore-American > folklore-American-southern > folklore-American-southern-Floridian.
  • Author - searches by specific authors by name, separating results by individual authors if there are multiples ones with the same name
  • Library of Congress Call Numbers - this allows you to search by Library of Congress numbers, which can be useful since results are by topic and the results display in order as you'd see them on the shelf.  

 

Newspapers

The newspapers search is the last link in the top menu.  This search allows you to search for articles from newspapers and news magazines.  There are two different searches available for newspapers - one that lets you search all newspapers available through the library, and another that lets you search just featured newspapers.

Featured papers were chosen by Olin librarians and are separated into four groups:

  • Business and Finance - includes titles such as Barron's, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal.
  • Historical Newspapers - access to articles from historical newspaper collections, including the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, New York Times, and Washington Post.
  • New York Times Collections - aggregates all of our available NYT collections.
  • Selected Florida Newspapers - Includes papers from across the state, including the Orlando Sentinel.

You can browse the featured collections as well as searching them.

The Citation Finder

Advanced users might find the citation finder useful.  This feature allows for known item searching when you have most of the bibliographic information you need to find a specific article, book, or journal.