Catalogue - HELP with Keyword Search
(With thanks to the University of Manitoba Library.)

Keyword Search will search the entire catalogue for any occurence of your search terms in any field. Use keyword searching when you are unsure of the exact name, title, or subject heading, or when you want to combine concepts, words, or phrases.

This page contains information on simple keyword searching and advanced keyword searching, including field labels, logical, proximity or truncation operators, combining search terms, and nesting search terms.

Simple keyword searching

Type a word or phrase into the text box, and select Begin Search. It will search for any record that contains your word or phrase, and display the items which match your search. Note: if you type in more than one word, your terms are treated as a single phrase, rather than as a set of separate search terms. Use the logical operators to search on more than one search term.

The Select Search Results Display items control the format that records will be displayed in. The default selection is Brief, which will display the brief citations for every item that matches your search. The Full option displays the complete record for every item. Summary displays only the number of items that matched your search, and does not display the citations at all.

Use the Select Number of records to display menu to set a maximum on the number of items to display on a page.

Advanced keyword searching

Keyword searches allow you to narrow and focus your search with field labels, logical operators, proximity operators, and truncation characters. You can combine as many search terms and search qualifiers as you need, and nest them to fix the relationships between search terms.

Field Labels

Each item in the catalogue has one unique item record, which is divided into a series of fields. These fields each contain a specific kind of bibliographic information -- titles are stored in the title field, subject headings are stored in the subject field, and so on. You can use field labels to tell the search to look for your search terms only in a specific part of the bibliographic record.
	Use this:	To find this:
	au woodcock	records with woodcock in the author field
	ti venice	records with venice in the title field
Complete list of field labels:
	This label:	Indicates this field:
	au	Name
	su	Subject heading
	nt	Notes
	ti	Title
	pu	Publisher
	fn	Format Name

Logical operators

Logical operators let you narrow or broaden your search by including more than one search term.
	Use this:	To find this:
	human and rights	only those records that contain both human and rights.
	twain or clemens	records with either twain or clemens
	mice not rats	records with mice but not rats

Proximity operators

Proximity operators let you narrow your search to items where two terms occur near to each other, but are not necessarily immediately adjacent.
	Use this:	To find this:
	cat w3 hat	records where hat follows cat within 3 words
	bach n2 johann	records where bach follows or precedes johann
	Note: the n and w operators may be followed by any single digit.

Truncation characters

Truncation characters allow you to find records that contain varying forms of your search term.
	Use this:	To find this:
	plato?	records containing plato, platonic, or platonist
	pl#to	records containing plato or pluto

Combining search operators

You can combine as many search terms and operators as you like.
	Use this:	To find this:
	au franklin urs? and ti technology	The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin
	su locke not au locke	Items about John Locke, but not items by John Locke

Nesting search terms

Nesting allows you to specify the order in which search terms should be processed.
	Use this:	To find this:
	(cats or dogs) and illustrations	records that contain the term illustrations, and either of the terms cats or dogs.
	cats or (dogs and illustrations)	records containing either the single term cats, or both of the terms dogs and illustrations.

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