Searching using Library Search
Searching using Library Search
HOW TO SEARCH
Searching is easy: enter some search terms into the Library Search box and hit enter or select search.
Your search terms can be:
- Word/s that describe a subject you are researching
- A few words from the title of a book and/or an author name
- Words from an article title and/or author name.
You can choose to search all sources or filter results by Format, Year or Content Type e.g. journal articles or books/ebooks. etc.
Looking for FULL TEXT
- Run a search
- Select Full Text located under Content Type
Library Search will show you a list of results available to view online.
LOOKING FOR A BOOK / EBOOK
- Enter your search terms into Library Search and run your search.
- Under Format, select Book
Only want ebooks? Under Format click to select only ebook
LOOKING FOR ARTICLES
- Enter your search terms into Library Search and run your search.
- Under Format, select Article
Looking for peer reviewed articles? under Content Type click to select Peer Reviewed
SAVING SEARCHES
To save your searches you will need to be signed in. Click on the Sign In icon on the top right hand corner of the page.
Run your search using your desired search terms. You can choose to keep your selections for subsequent searches by clicking Retain Filter, which is useful if you have filtered your results by source type, full text, publication date etc. . To save a search, click on Save Search, located above the result list.
You will be prompted to Save again and then you will see the following confirmation message - Saved search criteria
To access your saved searches, click on My Account (at the top of screen) and choose Saved Searches.
You can then run the search again or delete any unwanted searches.
Different Search Techniques
BOOLEAN OPERATORS
Library Search offers the following Boolean operations: AND, OR and NOT. The operators must be written in capitals.
By default, all terms in a search are combined with the AND operator.
To expand the results, use the OR operator. For example, football OR soccer will return results that contain either term.
You can also use OR with phrase searches such as “teacher training” OR “educator training”.
To exclude items in Library Search, use the NOT operator before a term. When used in the following query “animal NOT dog”, the results will not include the term dog.
WILDCARDS
You can search using the wildcards ? and *.
The question mark (?) will match up to 9 characters within a word. So for example can be used within wom?n to find results including women or woman. This technique also works for UK/US spelling col?r will find results including color and colour.
You can use asterisk to widen your results to include various word endings. First enter the stem of the word followed by an asterisk. A stem need to be at least three characters long. For example, genetic* will locate results such as genetic, genetics or genetically
You need to carefully select where you place the asterisk as you can end up with lots of irrelevant results. When used at the end of a word, such as Temp*, it will match all suffixes i.e. Temptation, Temple and Temporary,
PHRASE SEARCHING
Library Search allows for phrase searching with the use of quotation marks ” “. The query “teacher training” will find results that include just that exact phrase.
PROXIMITY SEARCHING
Proximity searches limit result sets to terms within a specified number of words from each other.
To perform a proximity search, enter your first search term then w followed by a number between 1-25 then the associated search term e.g. archaeology w3 roman. This will look for results that include word archaeology followed by the word roman with no more than three words between, in the order typed.
SEARCHING SPECIFIC FIELDS
The single search box in Library Search ( or keyword search option in advanced search) will search across many fields automatically. You can explicitly search a field using the syntax: field:(query) in the basic search
You first need to enter the correct syntax, followed by a colon and then add your search terms.
For example, the search ns:1234-5678 finds records that contain that value in the ISSN field.
Examples of searchable fields include:
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*When entering ISBN/ISSNs ending in X truncate the number using the asterisk key(*).
If you access the advanced search option, you can select further options by clicking on the drop down arrow under the search index and choosing the relevant search field.