Searching the Libraries Catalog is the easiest way to find books in our collection. Not only will it let you search for books across all of our campus libraries, but it can also show you eBooks and other electronic resources. You can request books through the Libraries Catalog and pick them up at any campus library, even if the books are in closed storage or are owned by a different Purdue regional campus.
After you've submitted your search, you can use the Active Filters sidebar to refine your results. There are many ways to use the search filters, but here are some of the simplest ones:
It can sometimes be easier to start with a broad search and then filter by Subjects rather than trying to figure out the best search terms. You can also use this as a way to discover search terms for future searches.
Although a search for bisexual fiction might retrieve the results you expected, you will probably run into some frustration if you try searching for gay fiction.
Even after you filter your results to only include books, searching for gay fiction will give you results for non-fiction books about gay fiction, biographies of gay authors, fiction written by authors named Gay, and so on. Somewhere in those hundreds of results, there will also be fiction about gay characters and fiction by gay authors. To narrow down your results, you will need to use Advanced Search.
Instead of searching for gay fiction, use the Advanced Search drop down filters to search for Subject contains "gay" AND Subject contains "fiction." While this is still a fairly broad search, it will still cut out hundreds of irrelevant results. If you want to narrow it down further, play around with the subjects you use in your search. Here are some ways you could narrow down your gay AND fiction search:
You can also use Advanced Search to expand your results with the OR function.
You can use AND with OR if you want to both expand and narrow your results. Keep in mind that searching for Subject contains "gay" OR Subject contains "lesbian" AND Subject contains "fiction" is going to give you results for every book with "gay" in the subject AND every book with both "lesbian" and "fiction" as subjects. Instead, you would want to search for the following:
If you want to exclude something from your results, you can use the NOT function. For example, if you wanted to cut down the amount of short fiction anthologies in your results, you could use the following:
If you are struggling to come up with search terms, check out the following lists of subject headings to see some examples:
If you're hoping to browse the shelves in-person, your best bet for LGBTQ+ non-fiction will be the 2nd floor of the Humanities, Social Science, and Education Library (HSSE). While there are interdisciplinary books on LGBTQ+ topics throughout the collection, the specific Library of Congress section on gender and sexuality is found in the HQ12-449 range of call numbers.
Our literature collections are not organized by genre or theme, so if you are hoping to find LGBTQ+ fiction on the shelf, you'll need to know the book you're looking for in advance. To refine your Libraries Catalog search to only include the campus libraries with fiction collections, you can using the "West Lafayette Campus Libraries" filter to select the following libraries: