Item Search Properties and Advanced Search Tips

Jessie GoodwinMSC Spring 2015 Membership

Meeting

Item Search and Display Properties

Advanced Searching in WorkFlows

• Truncation and Substitution• Boolean operators• Positional operators• Relational operators (use with date limits)

Truncation $ and Substitution ?

• Truncation $ “I know the title has vacuum in it. Or maybe vacuums. Or vacuuming. Something like that.”

Title keyword search, vacuum$ to find titles with all of the above terms in them.• Substitution ? “The author’s last name is Connelly.

Or maybe Connolly.”Author keyword Conn?lly to retrieve both last names• Also works in date field 199$

Boolean Operators

• AND—cats AND dogs, ignores records about ONLY cats or ONLY dogs

• NOT--cats NOT dogs excludes any records about cats that also contains info about dogs

• OR—info about cats, info about dogs, and info about cats and dogs

• XOR—only about cats or only about dogs, doesn’t include cats and dogs

Positional Operators—search terms in close proximity to one another

• SAME—record field contains all of the specified terms

• WITH—field contains a SENTENCE with all of the specified terms

• NEAR—field contains all search terms adjacent to each other but doesn’t match order

• ADJ—all of the search terms adjacent to each other and in the order entered

Relational Operators—allow you to search numerical expressions

• < Less than• >Greater than• =Equal to• <=Less than or equal to• >=Greater than or equal to

• If you want to search for items that include these operators, enclose in quotes to avoid errors ie e=mc2

• ie same and near

Sample searches

• I’m looking for a book about working dogs published recently. Maybe in 2013 or 2014? Or this year? Not sure.

• There is a book I need for a class. It has either “women” or “woman” in the title and is by either Stevens or Stevenson.