Advanced Search

Within OneSearch you can also perform a more specialized search by using Advanced Search (Boolean Operators):  A more complex boolean search may provide better, more targeted results. You can do an advanced search in either Any field  or Author/Creator or Title or Subject or ISBN (International Standard Book Number).   In conducting an advanced search you can limit your results to a specific material type (books or articles or journal titles or images), to a specific language or any language, a specific start date (e.g., 01-01-10 for January 1^st, 2010) or a date range (e.g., 01-01-1980 to 31-12-2000), instead of a search for all available items.

 If you did an advanced search on Barack Obama as an author and limited it to titles in the Library Catalog (one of the 3 choices listed at the top of the screen) the results would be fifteen  titles, including books and videos for which Obama is the author/creator.

You can also do an Advanced Search on a title.  If you searched under the title Avenue of Mysteries (the novel by John Irving) and wanted to see Everything available in our library you would find 37  titles. The first one listed is the novel by John Irving and the rest of the results include reviews,  articles, other books and web resources covering this John Irving novel.

An Advanced Search on a subject can also be completed. but you  have to limit your subject to is exact  (not contains or starts with). You can conduct an advanced subject search on occupational therapy  as a subject (is exact) and  limit it  to titles in the Library Catalog.  If you are unsure of  how to do a subject search with is exact , please check with our research librarians.  You could further limit this search to books  published since January 1st, 2015 (01-01-2015) and in the English language.   The results would then be less than 40 titles.  You can also do a search for Streaming Media on this subject in English since 2015 and identify  less than  20 titles.  

Another way of doing an advanced search is to link two possibly related subjects.  A researcher may want to find recent articles available at our library linking the subjects anorexia nervosa and psychotherapy.  Note that subject searching  is limited to is exact and not starts with or contains. The results could then be further limited to titles published since 2018 (01-01-2018) in the English language.  The results of this search would then be less than 100 articles.   The  researcher can then review  them and determine which are worth reading.  In addition the researcher can do a Newspaper search on articles linking these subjects.

A library researcher may want to find videos and films in our Library Catalog on the subject of the Second World War.  The appropriate Library of Congress Subject Heading would be:  World War 1939-1945.  If you are unsure of the appropriate subject heading you can ask one of our research librarians  This search could be limited to material type Video/Film.  This search could also be limited to titles in the English language.  If you are only interested in the more recent titles you can limit it to the last 5 years, 01-01-20105.  The resulting search with these limits (videos/films in the English language published since 2015) would be less than 50 titles, including documentary films, documentary television programs,  and titles prepared by the  war veterans themselves.