How to Refine Your Search
When searching the library catalogue it is important to know how to refine your searches. This can be done with search facets. These are located on the left hand side and can be divided into drop down menus. All of these facets are useful but the video to the right focuses on some of the most commonly used ones.
Truncation
Truncation, also called stemming, is a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings.
Wildcards:
Alternatively called a wild character or wildcard character, a wildcard is a symbol used to replace or represent one or more characters. The most common wildcards are the asterisk (*), which represents one or more characters, and the question mark (?), which represents a single character. In the examples below of how a wildcard may be used, realize that wildcards are relatively universal but may not work in every program.
If you have questions about applying this technique to your search, Ask Us!
Boolean operators (words; AND, OR and NOT) help narrow or broaden your search results from the library catalogues and databases.
Why use Boolean operators?
The Advanced Search on the library catalogue includes easy-to-use prompts for AND, OR, and NOT.
Use AND in a search to:
The purple triangle in the middle of the Venn diagram below represents the result set for this search. It is a small set using AND, the combination of all three search words.
Be aware: In many, but not all, databases, the AND is implied.
Use OR in a search to:
All three circles represent the result set for this search. It is a big set because any of those words are valid using the OR operator.