General Search Hints

• Omit initial articles a, an, and the.
• Searching is not case sensitive.
• Right truncation is assumed in browse searches.
• Omit ampersands and apostrophes (e.g., O Brien not O’Brien).
• Retain hyphens, or replace hyphens with a space (example: time-worn or time worn).
• Phrase searching can be done by entering the search string in quotes.
• There are no stopwords in the catalog.
• In keyword searches, you may use and, or, and not operators.
• The default operator in a keyword search is and.
• For keyword searches, use ? or * to truncate terms.
• If you get unexpected results reformulate your search.

There are three different types of searches in the catalog: basic searching, advanced searching, and expert searching.