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Doing Business in South Africa: Finding Books on South African Culture

Searching for books on South African culture

Although you'll be using articles and reports for the bulk of your business research for this project, books can be valuable source of information on the culture of South Africa.

In GIL Find or the Catalog tab on the library homepage enter search terms relevant to your topic:

Business Etiquette Books

Keywords and Subject Headings

Searching with keywords that describe your topic is a good way to start your search. Unless you specify that you are searching in a specific field (author, subject, title, etc.) you will be doing a keyword search. The catalog will pull up all books that contain your search terms in any field. Brainstorm different keywords that are related to your topic and see what you get.  

Use Boolean searching (AND, OR, NOT) to expand or narrow your searches. 

If your keyword searches yield too many irrelevant results you can increase relevancy by using subject headings.

Subject headings are standardized terms that ensure books on the same topic can be found even if the keywords are different.

A subject search for South Africa and anthropology will look like this:

The Subjects listed in a catalog record show you the Subject Headings that have been assigned to that book. Clicking on a subject link generates a new search using the linked term as a subject heading.