Boolean operators:
AND, OR, NOT allow you to limit or expand searches depending on your needs.
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AND
Wagner AND Friedrich (romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich)
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OR
piano OR klavier
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NOT
Schumann NOT Elisabeth (early 20th century lyric soprano)
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Phrase searching:
An important strategy to employ when searching phrasal concepts or conducting known-item searches for titles:
- For example, Album for the Young will search for Album AND for AND the AND Young.
- However, "Album for the Young" in quotation marks will search for the Schumann composition.
Nested Searching:
When pairing two or more keywords with another keyword, it is helfpul to "nest" the former terms within a larger Boolean search.
- For example, Chopin AND (Sand OR Dupin OR Dudevant) will return results for Chopin and his partner, Amandine Aurore Lucille Dupin (aka, George Sand and the Baroness Dudevant).
- Many catalogs or databases will have an "advanced search" option, which provides multiple search bars to facilitate nested searching.
Truncation and Wildcards:
Most catalogs and databases enable users to search variations of keywords by using truncation (*) or wildcard (e.g., ?, $, !) symbols.
- For example, one could search for romantic* to find romantic, romanticism, romanticize, and so on.
- Wildcard searching works similarly: a search for mu??k would return musik (Ger), muzak, and so on.
- Combining the two, viol?n* would return violin, violinist, violon (Fr), violoniste (Fr), violino (It), and so on.
