LibrarySearch Help

Using the LibrarySearch Advanced Search gives you more options to focus your search than the Basic Search. Using Advanced Search allows you to refine your search to generate results that match very specific criteria, including limiting your search by publication date, material type, language, date range, and search scopes that are unavailable in Basic Search.

Using Advanced Search will give you more search options. The default search is by keyword, but you can also choose Author/creator, Title, Subject, ISBN, ISSN and Call Number. There are also several options related to items on Course Reserves, including course instructor, course ID, course name, and course department name. Click on "Any field" to change your search filter (see below):

You can put all your search terms in one search box (using Boolean AND, OR, and NOT operators as needed), or you can add up to 7 search criteria boxes by clicking on "+Add a new line."

Advanced Search provides the option to search more search scopes than are available when starting from the library home page. In addition to the search scopes available in the Basic Search from the library home page (UO + Summit + Articles, UO + Summit, UO Libraries, Course Reserves, and Articles), you also have the option to limit your search to materials in more specific collections, including the Curriculum Collection, Design Special Collections, Documents Collection, Children's and YA Collection, Knight Reference, Music Collection, and Special Collections.

You can limit by publication date by entering a start date and/or end date for the dates you are interested in. You can put in just the year(s) you are interested in, or you can specify a specific month and date.

You can use the material type limiter to limit your search to a particular material type. These include Print books, Ebooks, Articles, Journals, Eaudio, Streaming Video, Maps, Scores, Images, Dissertations & Theses, and Reviews. If you'd like to limit your search to more than one material type, try doing your search and then using the resource type filter to select multiple resource types. Note that there are additional resource types you can access using the filters that don't appear in the material type limiter menu.

To limit your results to items in a specific language, you can select the language of your choice from the Language menu.

Wildcard searching allows you to use a character to stand in for a single character or multiple characters in a search term. This can be useful for accounting for spelling and word variations, or even to do an open-ended search for all the materials within a particular collection/scope or language. The different types of wildcards you can use include:

? = single character wildcard

Example: wom?n would return search results with both the words woman and women

* = multiple character wildcard, also known as truncation (only works for locally owned items)

Example: child* would bring return search results that contain words like child, children, childhood, etc.

Note: The system ignores wildcard characters placed at the beginning of search terms. For example, the system treats the search terms ?aying and *aying as if you had searched for aying.

You can also use $$ as a wildcard to conduct an open-ended search for all the materials that meet certain filter criteria (like specific collections/scopes, languages, material types, etc.). For example, you could do a search to see all the DVDs in French, or all the children's/YA books in Spanish (see screenshot example below). Note that with larger collections, it's recommended to narrow your search using additional filters since the system will limit the number of results at a certain point.

You can use AND, OR, and NOT (also known as Boolean operators) to combine your search terms more effectively. In brief:

• AND - Retrieves results that have all search terms (example: cats AND dogs)
• OR - Retrieves results with at least one search term; useful for synonyms/related terms (example: Native American OR American Indian)
• NOT - Excludes results with a particular search term (example: apple NOT fruit)

You can write your search in one search box using these operators (they must be in all caps), using parentheses to group related terms, or you can use multiple search boxes to construct your search.

LibrarySearch's Advanced Search provides the option to pick one of these operators between each search box. The search will default to AND, but you can click on the menu to change to OR or NOT. You can add up to 7 search criteria boxes by clicking on "+Add a new line."

In the below example, we would be searching for results that contain the words "language teaching" and the words "elementary school."

For more information and examples of how to use Boolean operators, please see the relevant page in our Getting Started with Library Research guide.