Omni is the search interface for the library catalogue. By searching within Omni, you can find books, e-books, databases, journal articles, videos, government documents, and more, held at any of the libraries within the York University Libraries system.
To get the most out of the search platform, ensure you have signed in using your Passport York login credentials. This will allow you to save searches and filters, pin your favourite materials, access your library account, and review your search history.
Boolean Logic
AND makes searches focused. It connects distinct concepts and generates fewer results.
OR helps to find concepts with similar terms.
For example, you can search sports AND law. You can also search law OR legal.
Quotation Marks
Keep words together when it is important by using quotation marks. This can apply to proper names, titles or to concepts. For example:
Wildcard ? and Truncation *
To replace a single character in a word, use ?. For example, wom?n will give you:
To search variant endings of word, use *. For example, cultur* will search for
Use the truncation symbol with caution. Depending on your topic, it may be better to use an OR. For example culture OR cultures.
Start on the York University Libraries home page. Ensure you begin your search by using the Advanced Search function. You can select this option beneath the Omni search bar. This will allow you to provide more detail for the kind of resource you are looking for, and thus get more relevant search results.
In the example below, the search includes subject terms (sports law) and keywords (Canada). You can also search by author or title, or leave the default setting to any field, which will search anywhere for your keyword. The most important filter to set is the resource type, to the right of your search terms, where you can specify that you are looking for books and e-books. If you forget to do this, you can always refine your results after you enter your search.
Once you have entered your search, it will return a results page. Depending on your search terms, there can oftentimes be a large number of results that might not be relevant to your needs. Using the refine your results section on the left side of the screen, you can filter your search by publication date, subject terms, and so forth. To receive only e-books in your search results, include the available online filter, pictured below.
Once you have found an e-book, you can click on the available online button just below the book's title and author. This will open the catalogue record and provide a link to the database which holds the e-book. You will be prompted to login again with your Passport York credentials to authenticate yourself as a York community member. Depending on the e-book platform, you can download, save, highlight, or make notes within the e-book. Check through the rest of this guide for more information on using specific e-book platforms.
Personalize and Save Your Search 
You might find that your search provided you with lots of relevant results, and you want to ensure you don't lose track of them. You can save your search query, which will save the exact terms, filters, and results to your profile. You can find this option below the advanced search bar, and above your search results.
Beside the save query option, there is also an option to personalize your search. By using this feature, you can select the preferred disciplines you can search under, ensuring that all of your results going forward are within the Law discipline. This simply helps to focus your search.
Cite, Email, Save, and more 
There are also features for each individual resource, which are displayed in the right corner of the record. You can select the citation button (pictured as quotation marks) to help generate a citation for this particular e-book, in MLA, APA, Chicago, and Harvard style. If you choose to use this option, ensure you check that the citation is generated correctly.
You can also choose to email yourself the link to the catalogue record. This will send you the information the information about the resource, as well as the link to the record in the catalogue. This feature is helpful if you are working in group projects and want to share access to a resource, or if you want to access a resource later.
You can save an item to your favourites by selecting the pin button. This will save a record to your library profile for you to access later. To use this feature, you have to ensure you are logged into your account.
Finally, you can make use of additional features, like copying the permalink or printing a catalogue record, by selecting the three dots to show you more options.
Virtual Browse
The virtual browse feature can be found when you open a catalogue record to view a resource. If you scroll to the bottom of the record, a list of related records can be found. You can scroll through these to find other relevant materials for your research. This is a helpful feature that displays resources you may have missed, depending on the search terms or filters you have used. An example of a virtual browse selection is pictured below.
