au: the Author field
ti: somewhere in the title field
su: appears in the LIbrary of Congress Subject Headings...this is good for books or ebooks but not journal articles
kw: anywhere in the record. Any search is a keyword search, but you can use this when combining terms (see below)
bn: the ISBN number, can be without hyphens
in: the ISSN number, but do include the hyphen
no: the OCLC number
You can use Boolean searching using capital letters for AND - OR - NOT
SOME EXAMPLES:
au:wright AND architecture finds wright and architecture in the author field, not what we want
THIS IS BETTER:
architecture AND au:wright will work better
au:wright AND (ti:architecture OR su:architecture)
finds the author Wright if the Title includes "architecture" or if the Subject includes "architecture"
au:wright AND kw:architecture
finds the author Wright and the word "architecture" anywhere in the record
Symbols or wildcards may help you to search with more precision:
In command line searching these symbols may be useful = : " "
a label followed by = will search the words in the exact order in the field
a label followed by : will search the words in any order in the field
a label followed by : and " " will search for the words in the exact order in the field (quotations may also be used in a basic or advanced search without a label to find an exact phrase)
Wildcards # or ? represent characters in a search term. Use them if you are not sure of the spelling, if there is an alternate spelling or if you only know part of the term.
Discovery finds plurals of words automatically (e.g., if you search for "home" it will find "homes" as well.
# represents a single character. Wom#n finds results for woman and women.
? any number of additional characters. If you know the maximun number of characters the wildcard will replace use a number, such as ?2. Fine?2 retrieves records that contain the word fine, plus variations of the word with up to two other characters, such as finer, finest.
* you can also use an asterisk for unlimited truncation
Truncation ? or * allows you to search for a term plus variations. Architect? or architect* would find architects, architectural, architecture. Architectur? or architectur* would find architecture, architectural
