LBCC Library--Using Britannica Online

Britannica Online is a fully searchable and browsable collection of authoritative references, including Britannica's latest article database, hundreds of articles not found in the print Britannica, Britannica's Book of the Year, and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate dictionary (Tenth Edition).

To use Britannica Online, you need to be at a computer with Web access on campus (there is no off-site usage allowed.). Open your browser and go to the Long Beach City College Library home page, then click on"Encyclopaedia Britannica."

Britannica Online allows you to use both Natural-Language Searches in which you may enter your search in the form of a word, phrase, or question in plain English, as well as Boolean Searches in which you can use the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, and ADJ (adjacency).

*Note: Boolean operators must always appear in all capital letters, but you should never use all capitals in your search query otherwise.

Click inside the query box to get the cursor and type in your search query.
Select the number of article titles you want to display by clicking on the arrow next to the Display box and then clicking on the number of your choice. The default number is 10 titles, but you may choose to display from 3 to 500.
Click on the Search button or press the Enter key on the keyboard

Your search results will appear on the screen as a list of articles with the titles in hypertext and a short description of the information contained in each article. Simply click on the desired article to view the full text. Some of the article descriptions will also have key words or "See:" references written in hypertext and you may click on those words as well to view additional related articles. You can move back and forth between the articles and your search results by clicking on the Back and Forward buttons on the web browser.

The search screen can be found by scrolling to the bottom of each page you access after your first search so that you can either limit your current search or conduct a completely new search.

To limit your current search you can either simply add new words to the query you previously entered and click the Search button

Make use of the Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT, and ADJ) by separating the words you want to search for with the appropriate Boolean operator. For Example:

Jane AND Grey	finds only entries containing both words
dolphin OR whale	find entries containing either or both words
washington NOT george	find entries containing the first word, but not the second
John AND (iii or iv)	find articles containing the first term in combination with either the second or third term
artificial ADJ intelligence	find entries containing these two words in this order where the second word is either adjacent to the first word, or follows within 15 characters of it

Note: The ADJ (adjacency) operator can be powerful for finding specific names and phrases. The above search, for example, would find articles containing the phrase "artificial intelligence", and skip those that may contain "artificial systems", or "intelligence tests." Also, since an adjacency search finds phrases within 15 characters, the search for Harry ADJ Truman will find Harry S. Truman.

The asterisk (*) is also another helpful tool if you want the search to cover a range of endings for a stem word.

For example: anthropol* will find articles containing anthropology, anthropologist,Anthropological, anthropologic, anthropologie, and so on.

If you want your search to include only those articles that contain your search word(s) in the title or subhead you can submit your search query as follows: title=vatican. Similarly, you can perform the search query: contents=vatican to search the body of an article for your search word(s).

At the bottom of the page you have the option of clicking on "Query Report For This Search"; this will allow you to see a summary of how your search query was interpreted. This may help you modify, rethink, and/or rephrase your search query for better results. If you need further assistance please as for help at the Reference Desk in the Library.

For more in-depth knowledge about online databases, Library has walk-in workshops:

At LAC: Room L208, Open Access Lab, Wednesday 1:30-3pm
or schedule with Librarian at (562) 938-4576