The main search box on the Library home page will retrieve material relevant to your search terms from two different sources:
1) The CU Library Catalog (which includes everything the library owns: books, eBooks, journals, newspapers, video and audio materials, archives etc.), and
2) The article-level content of all of our subscription article databases (including articles from academic and popular journals, newspapers etc.)
Click the "view" boxes in the initial results set to focus in on any one medium ("View 115 books from Catalog" etc.)
Alternately, changing from "All Resources" to any of the categories in the drop-down menu on the right of the search box (Catalog, etc.) will limit your searches to that particular resource.
Once you are within a set of search results for a particular medium (i.e. Books), you can massage your results in various ways using the facets on the right side.
--Use "Language" to limit the results to books in those languages that you can read.
--Use "Publication Year" to hunt for older books, or newer, or those of a certain date range.
--Use "Subject" to limit to just those that interest you
--Reduce results by getting rid of "fiction" or "juvenile"
--Use "Library Location" to see where books are located, and to "Rare & Manuscript" to see which are old or rare.
On any catalog search results page, you will see a link like one of the two below on the right side of the gray bar at the top:
Clicking here will allow you to search in ways more specific (limiting the search to any one of a dozen fields in a catalog record), more flexible (using "all," "any," "begins with" and "phrase" searching.), and more powerful (adding a second layer of searching with "and," "or," and "not" relations to expand or limit the first set of search terms.)
Some powerful examples:
--"Chin" (begins with) will bring back China and Chinese
--"Cookbook" search limited to Subject will take away all non-cookbook uses of the term "cookbook" (JAVA Cookbook etc.)
--"TX724.5" search limited to Call Number will bring back nothing but Asian cookbooks
You can rearrange your results set in various ways to suit your needs.
--If you want to see older books at top, sort by "year ascending"
--If you want to see newer books at top, sort by "year descending"
--You can also rearrange in alphabetical order by call number, author or title.
Full-text articles are awesome research tools, as they allow you to hone in easily on specific areas of interest, speeding up the research process. (Don't neglect books as well, however, either for more extended and complex arguments or to find information through their indexes.) There are two main issues, however, with the "Articles and Full Text" database that the library offers:
1) Too much information. General search terms will bring back thousands of results, which is unhelpful. If you can't make your search terms more specific to return a more reasonably sized list, then try a more focused article database. Bibliography of Asian Studies is highly recommended for research in this area.
2) Too much fluff. Our databases range from peer-reviewed academic journals to popular magazines and newspapers. Use the "peer-reviewed" tab at the top to eliminate most of the latter. Another problem that you will have in food studies is the number of scientific or nutrition-focused articles, versus more humanities-based approaches. Using different filters can eliminate some of them.