A keyword search can find words and phrases anywhere within an author, title, contents, series, publisher or subject field.

If you simply enter keywords in to the search box and hit search, you will retrieve records ranked according to their relevancy.

Use the "and" operator to combine words and phrases; Use the "or" operator to broaden your search to include all relevant terms or synonyms.

Note If you want to search for phrases that start with or contain Boolean or proximity operators (and, or, not, and not, before, after, near, within), you need to put them in quotes. A search of near east gets no records a search of “near east” gets more than 1000 hits.

In the Advanced Keyword search, you can combine words and phrases by selecting the Boolean operators from the pulldown menu (as indicated in brackets).

chinese and women and (writers or authors)

History [And]
Naples or Napoli [And]
Borgia or Alexander

Use "near" to specify words close to each other, in any order.

If you want to search for phrases that start with or contain Boolean or proximity operators (and, or, not, and not, before, after, near, within), you need to put them in quotes. A search of near east gets no records a search of “near east” gets more than 1000 hits.

Words may be right-hand truncated using * (for 1-5 characters).

Use ** for unlimited truncation.

Use a ? to replace a single character in the middle of a word.

account*

agri**

wom?n

Enter a single asterisk (*) into the top search box, then use the limit options (language, format, location, publisher, or year) to search for materials with the characteristics you need.

You can do multiple limits for example search of all the items in the Rare Book Collection that are in French and that have dates between 1600 and 1650.

Some searches will reach the limit of 32000 items retrieved. If you see that number then you know that your results are not the true number.

* and Icelandic in the drop-down language menu to limit to items in Icelandic in our collection

* and rare book collection as location and french as language and dates as 1600 and 1650

Specify fields to search using the Field pulldown menu (as indicated in brackets.

Note: remember these are keyword fields so a search of henry james as author will get you works by Henry James, James Henry, Henry James Steadman, etc.

You can also specify fields to search, using field abbreviation. Fields available for this database are a: (author), t: (title), d: (subject), N: (note), m: (media only), and v: (search media and bibliographic data).

[Author] Doctorow