Keyword searching--Watch this tutorial from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Boolean operators (AND, OR, AND NOT) These words are used to combine your search terms. Click here to see a tutorial in the Gingrich Guide.
Truncation--Use the asterisk * to retrieve all variants of a word. For example, politi* will retrieve political, politics, politician. But be careful! Pol* will retrieve poll, polite, pollution and all other words that start that way. You will get many irrelevant items.
Field--A field is the location in the record where your terms are located, e.g., title, subject, author.