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In order to get the most out of the library catalogue here are some searching tips you may find useful.
Search operators allow you to either restrict or expand your searches in order to retrieve what you want. The operators are:
The following examples use the terms "cats" and "dogs" to demonstrate how to use the search operators.
Try doing a search just for cats, and another just for dogs and note down how many items you retrieve for each. Then try using the "and" operator, and see how many you get.
cats and dogs
This search, will only show you items that contain information about cats and dogs.
This kind of search will reduce the number of results your search will produce as both terms have to be in the results. For example, items that are only about cats would be excluded.
The order of the search terms is not important in this search.
cats or dogs
This search, will only show you items that contain information about cats or dogs.
This kind of search will increase the number of results your search will produce as either term have to be in the results. For example, it doesn't matter if an items is only about dogs, it will still be included.
The order of the search terms is not important in this search.
cats not dogs
This search, will only show you items that contain information about cats, but will exclude anything about dogs.
This kind of search will reduce the number of results your search. The catalogue will do a search for cats, and then exclude from those items anything that also includes the word "dog".
The order you enter your search terms in is important in this type of search.
By default the catalogue will always "and" terms together if no search operator is entered.
Try doing a search for Not the nine o'clock news without and then with quotes, you'll soon see how useful quotes are!
Using the "and" operator for a search may not always be useful as this will retrieve items with both the terms entered, but not always next to each other.
You may also find that the titles you are after contain search operators, and so the catalogue tries to "and", "or" or "not" the search terms together, when you don't want it to.
In order to search for a phrase, you simply entered the terms in quotes:
"Not the nine o'clock news"
Try playing around with the brackets in the example below, what happens if you put brackets round "recipes and chinese" instead?
Brackets can be used to combine "and", "or" and "not" searches together. For example, you are interested in finding some recipes for chinese or japanese food. You can enter:
recipes and (chinese or japanese)
Note: search terms in brackets are usually processed first.
To search for just a DVD version of the film simply add "DVD" to the end of your search:
"harry potter" and DVD
Similarly for videos add "VID" to your strategy:
"harry potter" and VID
If you are interested in a title and you don't care if it's a DVD or a video:
"harry potter" and (DVD or VID)
Sometime you may find it useful to use a truncation symbol in your search to search for all variations of a word.
The truncation symbol is a dollar sign ($).
For example if you wanted to search for computer, computers, and computing you could simply use:
comput$
If you're not sure how a word is spelt, you can replace a character in it with a wildcard.
The wildcard symbol is a question mark (?).
For example if you were not sure if the title of a book had "woman" or "women" in it, you could do the following search:
wom?n
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