Searching

1 . Enter words or phrases in "Search all fields." You are searching through all the fields that describe digital resources. By using both search boxes, you can enter more than one word or phrase to view records that contain all the words you entered (choose "and") or any of the words you entered (choose "or"). See tips for more on how to search.

2 . Enter a word or phrase in one or more specific fields. For instance, you can search for jane austen in the Author/Creator field, which limits your search to just that field instead of all fields. Entering words or phrases in multiple boxes limits your search further. See tips for more on how to search.

The specified fields you can choose among are:

• Title : This will look for titles of books, articles, journals, audio files, etc., in the title field of the resource record.
• Author/Creator : This will look for authors of books, creators of paintings, institutions responsible for a pamphlet, etc., in the author/creator field of the resource record.
• Subject : This will look for words or phrases that have been used to describe the topical nature of a resource. These are subjects used by the resource publisher to classify the resource.
• Resource Type : This will look for certain kinds of resource types, i.e., text, image, audio, video. This is not a fully comprehensive search due to limitations in normalizing this field.

You may also choose how you want to sort your search results, by title, author/creator, date descending, date ascending, hit frequency and weighted hit frequency.

• Both title and author/creator sorting orders your results from A-Z.
• Date descending orders your results from newest to oldest, e.g., from 2001 to 1979.
• Date ascending orders your results from oldest to newest, e.g., from 1979 to 2001.
• Hit frequency counts the number of instances of the words and phrases you entered and orders them from highest count to lowest count.
• Weighted hit frequency does what hit frequency does but gives more weight to instances of words and phrases in certain fields. The records will display a score if weighted hit frequency is chosen, based on the algorithm we use.

For results lists over 1000, we cannot provide sorting options. The default sort order is by title.

Searching Tips

• Words and Phrases : If you enter more than one word in a search box, the words will be treated as a phrase and searched together, e.g., entering fancy dress in "Search all fields" will find records that have the word fancy next to dress .
• Inverted Author Names : Authors may be in inverted order, so if you don't find appropriate resources using one method, e.g., emily dickinson , try it inverted, e.g., dickinson emily .
• Word Variations : Use an asterisk with a word stem to find variations on the word, e.g., searching for civ* will match civ , civil , civic , civilization , and civilian .
• Punctuation : All other punctuation, other than * , will be ignored, e.g., searching for gone? will retrieve records containing both gone? and gone .
• Capitalization : Capitalization is ignored, e.g., Pragmatism and pragmatism are searched the same way.