Boolean AND

An Online Tutorial Taking You Through the Steps of the Library Research Process Boolean AND

Tutorial Contents:

Boolean Operators were first developed by the English mathematician George Boole back in the 1800's. All modern day digital computers are developed on the binary language of Boolean Algebra. The principles of Boolean logic are important for the storage and retrieval of information. Boolean algebra or the algebra of logic shows the logical relationship between concepts.

There are three Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT

The first two, AND and NOT, will narrow your search results.

Boolean AND is used to join together unique terms or phrases when keyword searching.

The Boolean AND tells the database that each term is important, and therefore, must be present in your search results. The more terms you join with an AND, the narrower and more focused your results will become.

Boolean Logic is often represented visually using Venn diagrams.

In the above example the set of results are where the three circles overlap. The search results would only include sources that contained all three of the search terms.

By the way, you do not have to capitalize your Boolean operators. They are capitalized merely for emphasis in the tutorial.