Tip of the Week

Tip for: 02.20.2006

Some Researcher Tips

Summary: Understanding how to use the Researcher is important for patrons to be able to quickly find and utilize information from the online catalog. This week's tip will discuss a few rules and tips to make searching the Researcher more efficient and effective.

Spelling Tips:

• If users are not sure how to spell a word, type a question mark at the beginning of the word. Alexandria will automatically do a sounds-like search.
• Researcher preferences can also be set to include the Sounds-like prompt. With the preference set, if no results are found from a search, the user will be prompted to do a Sounds-like search.
• The Browse button on the Boolean search allows users to see if the word they have typed matches a keyword from the index being searched prior to running the search. Selecting the desired term from the resulting browse list can change the entry.

Four Rules for Searching in Alexandria:

1. When searching for short words or root words, an "exact match" search might be better than the default "beginning with" search. 

Alexandria defaults to a "beginning with" search unless otherwise specified. This means an Any Word "CAT" search is actually any word beginning with "C-A-T". Items with words like cathedral, Catherine, Cather, catch, catcher, catches, catching, catastrophe, cataclysm, etc. would appear because they all begin with "C-A-T".

To make a search an "exact match" search, put a period after the search term. (e.g. "CAT.")

NOTE: Some root words are not short. "Civil" is a root word in English - civil, civilian, civilians, civilize, civilization, civilizations, civility, civilities, etc. "Roman" is a root word in English - roman, romance, romantic, romantically, Romanesque, Romanov, etc.

2. To get a more complete results list, use the Boolean search with the "Any Word" search and one word in each search box.

Doing a subject search on "Civil War" will only get those items that have an incorrect subject of "Civil War". It will not find those with the subject of "U.S.--History--Civil War, 1861-1865" because "Civil War" doesn't start the subject term. However, since subject terms also have the individual words of the subject keyworded under the any word category, searching for any word "Civil." and "War." will return more titles at one time and does not require an understanding of the subject headings.

3. Use the Browse button on the Boolean search to check the keyword list to make sure that the search term that was entered is a valid term in the Alexandria system. 

The Browse list only contains searchable terms for this collection and can be immensely valuable to ensure correct spelling or terminology. For instance, a correct subject might be "Mythology -- Occidental", however, there might not be any items in this collection with that subject and the dictionary would not have that as a search term in the list.

4. When doing a Boolean search of three or more search terms, when mixing ANDs and ORs, the order the search is entered determines the results that you receive.

Alexandria processes search requests from the Boolean Search window in a top down order. Whatever is in the first search box is found first, whatever is found in the second search box is second, etc. So, searching for "Mythology AND Roman OR Greek" returns different results than searching for "Greek OR Roman AND Mythology". The first search returns all books on Roman Mythology or any book that has Greek in the record. The second search returns only those books on Greek Mythology or Roman Mythology.

NOTE: When mixing ANDs and ORs, if there is one search term that should appear in every record returned by Alexandria, that search term should be the last thing searched for using the AND Boolean operator.

We hope these tips and rules will help you and your patrons use the Researcher more efficiently.

Thank you,

The Alexandria Staff Librarians

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