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You can search a author, title, subject, and notes separately or in combination.
Searching is simple,
but understanding the elements of search and display features will help you obtain reliable, consistent results.
The following examples illustrate the variety of results obtained from a search of William
Shakespeare using the single Search feature.
Author Searches
To search for works written by William Shakespeare:
- Click on Search and select Authors from the pulldown menu
(Figure 3). This limits your search to authors only.
- Select the beginning with option from the next pulldown menu (Figure 4).
- Type William Shakespeare in the empty query box (Figure 5) and click the
Search button or press Enter. The message Nothing was found for your search
should appear. (If the search produced a results set, the author's name in the record
was entered incorrectly.) Your search failed because the begin with option searches
for the terms you entered at the beginning of a line and in the order they were typed.
In other words, the PAC looked for an author whose last name was William and whose
first name was Shakespeare.
- Change the beginning with option to containing and select Search to relaunch the search. A
results list (Figure 6) will appear. The search was successful because the contain
search option does not care about word order or the position of the search term. Note
that:
- Your search window remains on the page, ready to launch another search;
- A numbered results list shows the items that match your search query;
- The results for each database searched are listed separately. (Scroll down the page to view results from other databases.)
- If multiple results were found for a search term, the type of search and the
number of items returned is displayed. For example, [Authors: Returns 570
items].
- Underlined portions of the display indicate that additional information is linked to
an item.
- Now modify your search so that the begin with option is selected and the query box
contains Shakespeare, William. (You may omit the comma, and you do not need to
capitalize letters.) Launch the search. A results set similar to that shown in Figure 6 should
appear. This time the search succeeded because authors' last names always appear
first in author fields.
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