Omni searches for books, journals, articles, documents, data, maps, multimedia, and more. It includes the physical holdings of many other partner libraries and books not available at Queen's and these can be requested directly within Omni.
Basic Searching
The default search in Omni is basic search with the scope Queen's + Omni Libraries. Basic search supports Boolean operators AND, OR, or NOT, and they must be entered in uppercase (e.g. papermaking OR "paper making"). Use quotation marks for phrase searching, otherwise AND is assumed between each word. (example: "material culture").
Advanced Searching
Use the drop-down options to limit your search to specific fields and/or a combination of fields (Author, Title, Subject, Call number). You can also specify the relationship of words in the search field using "contains", "starts with" or "is (exact)." Specific dates and languages can be selected. Resource type will limit your search to a specific format or material type, such as book or ebooks. For a comprehensive guide, please see Omni Search Tips.
| Use AND to tell the database that ALL search terms must be present in results. Narrows your search results | textiles AND japanese AND conservation |
| Use OR between words for synonyms. Broadens your search results | victorian OR 19th OR nineteenth |
| Use NOT to exclude terms | painting* AND acrylic* NOT oil* |
| Use quotation marks around phrases | "iron gall ink" |
| ? for single character wildcard (useful for variable spellings) | wom?n for woman, women |
| * for truncation (multiple character wildcard). Useful for variant endings of a root word. | exhibit* for exhibit, exhibits, exhibition, exhibitions |
| brackets to group terms (nested searching) | sculptur* AND (inuit OR "first nations" OR metis OR indigenous) |
Sign in to Omni offers tools to organize, save, and cite your research.
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Citation icon | Select one of ten different citation styles and generate a citation to the item. Be sure to check citations for accuracy |
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Envelope icon | Email a record to the item |
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Pushpin icon | Save this item to your list of favourites in Omni |
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Citation trails | Lead to sources that cite the work or to references cited in the item |
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Ellipsis icon | Shows action options including citation, email, permalink, export to citation managers and print record |
Signing in to Omni lets you save citations in Favourites, where you can label and collate personal collections and export citations to a citation manager. You can also check loans and requests, renew materials, access full text, view search history and create alerts.
Omni provides you with three different content collections to search:
Related Reading
Starting from an article of interest, related reading provides other relevant articles for the same topic.
Virtual Browse
Discover other books at Queen's on the same topic by browsing a virtual book shelf. Available in Omni records for print monographs, scroll to the bottom of the book's record to discover other print monographs that would be shelved with the item.