- Be specific: use the dropdowns for format and search type to focus your search.
- Use what you know. If you can’t remember the title of John Steinbeck’s book about the trip he took with his dog, just enter steinbeck dog and see what you find.
- You don’t need to add AND to a search — the catalog always searches all the words you enter.
- There are no special words that are ignored in catalog searches. Short, common words like and, or, not, a, an, the, etc., are searched like any other word.
- Capitalization and word order don’t matter: Abraham Lincoln, abraham lincolm and lincoln abraham are all the same search.
- You can put quotation marks around two or more words to search them as a phrase. For example, “new england” will only find records with that exact phrase, and not something like a book called England and the new global economy.
- You can exclude a word from a search by putting a minus sign before it with no space. A subject search on george washington -bridge will find books and other material about the President and not the bridge.
- The catalog uses common English language patterns to search plurals and other forms of a word. If you search elephant, you’ll get the results as if you searched elephants, and if you search parent, you’ll get results with the words parent, parents, parental and parenting. You can turn this off for a particular word by putting quotation marks around it: “parent” will search only for that form of the word.