A keyword search looks for terms anywhere in a catalog record. Type a single word or multiple words into the search box, then click "Find It."
If two or more words are entered into the search box, the words will be joined with AND during the search.
charles dickens searches charles AND dickens
love and death searches love AND and AND death
Boolean Operators can be used in keyword searches, but they must be capitalized.
sun OR moon searches sun OR moon
while
sun or moon searches sun AND or AND moon
Use quotations marks to search a string of words together as a phrase. It is not possible to truncate words within quoted phrases (" ").
"time travel"
Enclosing a phrase in quotation marks nullifies any use of words as Boolean operators, even if they are capitalized.
"ZOO OR LETTERS NOT ABOUT LOVE" as enclosed in quotation marks will retrieve only a few results of this exact phrase.
ZOO OR LETTERS NOT ABOUT LOVE without quotation marks will retrieve over 100,000 results because the terms OR and NOT are being used as Boolean operators.
Parentheses can be used to control the order of search operations:
medieval AND (clothes OR costume)
Use the asterisk symbol (*) to search the root of a word and variant endings.
recruit* gets recruit, recruits, recruiting, recruitment.
Use the tilde symbol (~) to find words close to each other within a number of words, in any order.
"online learning"~5 finds online and learning within 5 words of each other.
Field searching allows users to look for their keywords in specific areas of a record, such as in the titles, the subject headings, or the author/creator field. Field searching can be completed within Advanced Search or by using field codes. See more on the Field Searching page of this guide.
