Advanced Searching Video 3 Welcome to the Inforum’s Orientation Video Series on finding resources through the University of Toronto Libraries’ Catalogue. The goal of this video is to help you improve your searches by using the advanced search option, as well as making use of the way that your search results are clustered into groups, known as facets. Created by: Inforum Librarians Edited by: Kathleen Scheaffer & Victoria McAuley Design update & Narration by: Victoria McAuley Template by: Brenna Pladsen
Why Advanced Search? Apply limits before you search More effective, multi-field searching Advanced searching is useful when 1) you want to apply limits before you search and 2) when you want to search more efficiently by doing a multi-field search.
UTL Homepage To get to the advanced search screen, you can start at the U of T Libraries homepage. Scroll over to the, “Catalogue” tab located on the top right hand of the screen,
Accessing Advanced Search and look for the “advanced search” link located at the far right of the search box.
Accessing Advanced Search You can also find the advanced search link once you’re already in the basic search screen of the catalogue. Click on the word ‘catalogue’ to get to the basic search screen. Look for the “advanced search” link at the bottom right of the search box.
Advanced Search Notice that there are many boxes for OPTION 1 – THE MULTIFIELD SEARCH. The top box is for entering your search terms. You can add more boxes by clicking on the PLUS sign.
Advanced Search Suppose you know a few details about the book you are looking for, like the author’s last name and part of its title, and which library you want to use. In the first box, I will enter, ‘paquette’ and select “all authors” from the drop down menu. In the second search box I’ll enter cultural policy because I know it’s part of the title, but I can’t remember the whole subtitle. I’ll select title from the drop down menu. This is a multi-field search, because I am choosing to search for some words in the author field, and some words in the title field.
Advanced Search Limits are ways to filter your search, so that only results matching the limits are found. Notice that you can limit your search in a number of ways: By FORMAT: You can choose to look for just books, or just for Videos and DVDS.
Advanced Search By LANGUAGE: You can pick from numerous languages. If you want English language results, leave it as any language. Picking English would slow down your search, as we have many English language items in the catalogue.
Advanced Search By LIBRARY: This lets you choose which library to search for your resources. A very handy technique if you just want to find e-resources, such as e-books and e-journals, is to pick “ONLINE RESOURCES” as your library.
Advanced Search And you can limit by RESULTS: You could display up to 100 results at a time.
Advanced Search For now, let’s limit our search to just finding books in the Inforum, rather than all the U of T libraries.
Advanced Search From the dropdown menu, select “Faculty of Information (Inforum)” and press the search icon.
Advanced Search
Advanced Search Facets So, without knowing all the details about the book, I was able to find the Inforum copy of it by using the features in advanced search. Experiment with multi-field searching and limits to see how you can enhance your search techniques. You can set the field to be ANYWHERE as well as choosing specific fields like author and title in the search that we just did. Even if you don’t use the advanced search option when you start your search, you can narrow down your search results by using the facets that appear on the left hand side of the results screen. Facets group the results found by your search into useful categories such as subject, format, publication year, or author. You can filter your search results by using these facets.
Advanced Search Facets In Video 2, we found many hits when we searched for the author John Creswell who writes books on research methodology. I am going to show you how to refine that search, using facets. I am going to start with a basic search for the author John Creswell.
Advanced Search Facets We get 57 results. Look down the left-hand side to see “AUTHOR”, and click on it. Notice that there are 3 authors with the same name. Click on John W. Creswell. There are 17 results for this author – this is the one who writes about research methods.
Advanced Search Facets Look at the “SUBJECT” facet. Notice that 15 results have the subject tag ‘methodology’. Click on that.
Advanced Search Facets Now let’s look at the “PUBLICATION YEAR” facet. Let’s say you only wanted to look at the more recent books by John W. Creswell. Click on 2010 to present to see the 6 most recent titles.
Advanced Search Facets So, from an initial result of 57 available books, we used Author, Subject, and Publication facets to find the most recent books on research methodology by John Creswell.
Search Within The search within feature will help you to narrow down your search if you find you are getting too many results. Let’s start with a very broad search on the topic of “open access”. Do this as an “ANYWHERE” search.
Search Within I get 21,102 available results.
Search Within To put some context on this very broad search, let’s suppose I want to see things that have to do with open access in academic libraries. I can do this by entering the words, academic libraries and selecting ‘search within’. This will search my result to find those items that also contain the words academic libraries. You can see how useful the ‘search within’ feature can be.
Search Within Notice in the facets, that 124 of these items are available online. Using the facet that shows you what is online, is very useful when you are researching off campus. To summarize, this video demonstrated how to take advantage of the UTL catalogue’s advanced search options. It also demonstrated how to search within your results, and how to use the post search refinements called facets.