ART 103: Prof. Guest's Patronage Project: Tips for searching NASCAT

When searching for a specific artist in NASCAT, always enter the last name first. Such as: Cassatt, Mary.

Use Words in Subject as your search type. This will give you all of the books, videos, etc. that the library owns about Mary Cassatt. If you were to use Words Anywhere instead of Words in Subject, your results would include every item the library has that mentions Mary Cassatt.

When searching NASCAT, you will see the following option:

This essentially means- do you want to keep your search terms together?

For example: If you search for "modern art" you would want to select "yes" and keep your words adjacent. This would ensure that the catalog only showed you items about modern art.

If you selected no, then the catalog would search for every item that contained the words modern or art. So your results would include: modern poetry, modern dress, modern civilization, etc. and everything that included the word art.

The patronage project requires you to write about the time period in which your chosen artist/patron lived. 

For example: if I was interested in writing about Pablo Picasso, I would research his life. Then I might gather information on Spain, since that is where Picasso was born. However, just searching NASCAT for "Spain" will give you 502 results. Searching for "Spain history" will give you 246 results.

So try to be specific when you search, even if you don't know the exact years of the time period. You may be searching for a particular event in Spain's history- such as a war. Searching for "Spain history war" will give you 72 results.

You could also search using the exact dates, if you have them available. Using any of the following search terms would yield excellent results for information about Spain's history and Pablo Picasso.

"Picasso war"

"Spain civil war 1936-1939"

 "Picasso, Pablo. 1881-1973. Guernica "