Physical Geography

GEOG 102 F Physical Geography (3) (CAN GEOG 2) Three hours lecture per week. This course is an overview of the interrelationships, geographic patterns and basic physical processes that create the physical landscapes of the world. The study of geosystems involves the connections between the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. Topics covered include weather, climate, soils, natural vegetation and the forces and processes that modify the surface of the earth. Special emphasis is given to contemporary ecological problems. This course meets a physical science requirement at most four year institutions. (CSU) (UC) (Degree credit)

Physical Geography resources in and through The Fullerton College Library

Using keyword search to begin, physical geology, we can see that the subject for this area is "physical geology". Clicking on this subject heading in the record for the book retrieves all other works assigned this general subject heading.

Reserve materials in the collection

Note that the first titles retrieved in this search were reserve desk titles, you can check the catalog for the status of reserve items to see when they'll be available

Electronic books

  • A vision for the International Polar Year 2007-2008[electronic resource]
  • Contemporary meanings in physical geography[electronic resource]

Should we want to focus on an aspect of physical geography, we'd search that aspect :

Narrowing the search

Subject searching

  • Weather
  • A search of weather as a subject retrieves a list of books about weather, clicking on the second item in the list, "The change in the weather" to retrieve the record we see
  • that it's also assigned subject headings of:
  • climatic changes and
  • global warming
  • Clicking on either of these terms retrieves all the other works in the collection on either climatic change or global warming.

Boolean Searching

  • Boolean operators are powerful search tools if used wisely.
  • A Boolean Search Primer
  • To sum up, AND narrows the search by retrieving intersections of the Venn diagrams while
  • OR broadens the search by retrieving the whole circle or subject area of both terms used.
  • NOT narrows the search by eliminating terms that would bring up a different subject area in combination with terms searched.
  • Builder search in the catalog facilitates the use of boolean operators to narrow your search.

Journal articles

  • Boolean operators are particularly useful for searching the periodical databases. If your paper is on the effects of Volcanic activity on the weather, and you search Volcanoes and look through all the entries for articles dealing with the weather or worse yet, search Weather and look through the thousands of records dealing with weather for the ones having to do with volcanoes, it will take a long time for you to find results.
  • Using the Boolean AND to narrow the search allows you to retrieve that subset of the intersection of the circles of articles indexed with the term volcanoes and articles indexed with the term weather.
  • Were the retrieval set small in the databases, the search could be widened by ORing Weather with Climatic changes to add another subset of records.

The World Wide Web