Do you know how ….?

There are several ways to refine your searches on the Bib Search screen:

1. Power Search

Within Te Puna Interloan there is a feature called Power Search. This sits under the ‘Details’ button on the Advanced Search screen. Its use is a particularly good method of finding one-word titles and titles that contain common words.

Against the NBD a search for New scientist produces 71 hits. By selecting ‘Details’ and setting Position to ‘first in field’ and Structure to ‘phrase’ the result set is whittled down to 17 items. This example is so good that New scientist displays on the first screen of results. Using ‘first in field’ is similar to a ‘title begins with’ search.

Applying the same approach to a search for Nature reduces the result list from 10,000 hits to only 98. This is done by setting Position to ‘First in field” and Structure to ‘Word’.

2. Other precise search types

There are other methods available to refine searches. Having an ISSN or ISBN are the most precise search methods available. Also, with a common serial title adding ‘periodicals’ to the subject field can reduce the number of results presented. Adding this value to a search for ‘agriculture ecosystems’ reduces the result list from 34 to 9 items.

Another method is to add double quote marks to your search terms e.g. “new statesman”. This treats the words as a phrase and produces a results list of just 45 items.

More help with searching with VDX