Quick tips
- Quotation marks: placing quotation marks around a search phrase will yield results where the terms within quotation marks appear together as an exact phrase. For example, "cardiac nursing" will yield results where those two terms appear together.
- No quotation marks: using multiple terms without quotation marks will yield results where the terms appear separately, anywhere in a record.
- Asterisk: use an asterisk to search for variations of a word. For example, child* will yield results containing words like child, children, or childhood.
- Question mark: use a question mark to replace one character in a word. For example, wom?n will yield results containing woman and women.
Advanced search
Click the Advanced Search link next to the search box on pages in Library Search to open the Advanced Search window. You can configure your search using various combinations of the following options.
Show results from
Select a profile from the drop-down selector to expand or narrow your results (see What am I searching for more information about the search profiles).
Search field
Select a field such as "Title," "Author/Creator," or "ISBN," from the drop-down selector.
Match Type
Select options such as "contains" or "contains exact phrase." The options displayed in this drop-down vary depending on which search field you have selected:
- Contains: results will include the search terms you type, but your search terms may not appear in order (or even close together) within the individual records
- Contains exact phrase: results will exactly match the search term in your query, but can contain variants such "Stephen King" and "King, Stephen"
- Equals exact phrase: results will exactly match the search term in your query such as "Stephen King" (but not "King, Stephen")
- Starts with: results will match items that start with your search term (only available when Title or Call Number are selected as the search field)
Operator
Select "AND," "OR," or "NOT" to include or exclude additional Search fields, Match Types, and search terms in your search. See Using Boolean operators for more information about using these operators with either an advanced search or a simple search.
Use the + sign to add rows to your query (you may add up to seven rows) or use the trash icon to remove rows.
Resource Type
Select options such as "Books," "Journal Titles," or "Scores" from the drop-down selector.
Language
Use the Language drop-down selector to search by a specific language.
Date
Use the Date selectors to limit your search by start and end dates.
Editing an Advanced Search
After doing an advanced search, the terms and criteria of your search will appear above the search results in the space where you would normally see the simple search box.
- Click Edit to open the Advanced Search window where you can change your search terms and criteria such as Search field or Resource Type.
- Clicking Simple Search will display a basic search box in place of Advanced Search.
Using Boolean operators
You can conduct more sophisticated searches in both Simple and Advanced search using the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT. Write the operators in all caps, otherwise they will be ignored.
- AND: searches using AND yield results containing all of the search terms. Using AND has the effect of narrowing the search. For example, you could use "Toni Morrison" AND "Nobel Prize" to find Morrison's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
- OR: searches using OR yield results including any of the search terms. Using OR has the effect of expanding the search. For example, you could find works by contemporary Black writers using "Toni Morrison" OR "Alice Walker".
- NOT: searches using NOT exclude the term following the word NOT. For example, you could find items titled Beloved, while excluding work related to Toni Morrison, by using Beloved NOT "Toni Morrison".
In the Simple search box, you can use parentheses to group terms in an order of operations. For example, you can search for game NOT (chess OR checkers).
Voice search
Some web browsers support voice search. Click the microphone icon near the right side of the simple search box to activate it.
Locations filter
On a full record view, you can use filters to display specific items (hiding the other items) by using the Filter by box at the top of the Locations section and selecting from one of the drop-down selectors such as volume, year, or description. For example you can select "volume 31" of a journal or "Box 25" of an archival collection.
Basics of Library Search
Learn about key features in Library Search, including information about My Library Account and how to access online or physical resources.