How to Search the Collection

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To search the collection:

  1. Enter a word or phrase into the Keyword field.
  2. If desired, narrow your search using the search fields.
  3. Click Search.

For more help searching, visit a section below:


Narrowing your search

You can focus your search with the search fields below. The more terms you enter, the narrower your search results will be.

Field Description
Keyword

Enter a Keyword or words in this field. The search engine will search all indexed fields, including the abstract.
Title Enter terms to be found in the Title of the work.
Author Enter the name of the Author. The name can be entered as either "First name Last name" (e.g. John Baker) or "Last name, First name" (e.g. Baker, John).
Publication Data Enter the publisher or place the work was published.
Place of Publication Enter the place the work was published. This is generally a city.
Imprint Enter terms to find within the Imprint of the work.
Fiche Number Enter the Fiche Number including any hyphens.

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Searching multiple fields

You can search multiple fields at one time. The terms will be connected using the Boolean operator AND.

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Searching for exact phrases

You should use "double quotes" to search for exact phrases. Example: "fifteenth century"

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Finding variations of a word

You can use the following wildcard characters to find variations of a single term:

? The symbol ? is used to replace any single character, either inside the word or the right end of the word. ? cannot be used to begin a word.
Example: wom?n will retrieve results containing 'women' and 'woman'.
* The * symbol is used at the end of your term to find all forms of a word.
Example: unit* will retrieve results containing 'unit', 'unity' and 'united'.

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Using Boolean operators

Use the Boolean operators below to broaden and narrow your search.

AND Find all the words.
Example: united AND nations
AND NOT Find records which have the first word, but not the second word.
Example: united AND NOT nations
OR Find any of the words.
Example: united OR nations

Boolean operators can be typed in either upper case letters (e.g. 'AND') or lower case letters (e.g. 'and').

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Stop words

Stop words are words which form part of the system's search query language, and which therefore cannot be searched on in the normal way. To search for a stop word as a keyword, enclose it in double quotation marks.
Example: fifteenth "and" century will retrieve documents containing 'fifteenth', 'and', and 'century'.

The stop words are AND, EXACT, BY, NEAR, NOT and OR.

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