LibCat Advanced Search

On this page:

Similarities and Differences

LibCat Advanced Search offers the same searches described in the Introduction to LibCat Searches, but allows you to customize your search more narrowly.

The Advanced Search box might look intimidating at first, but you don’t have to use all of its features. After we look at each feature, we’ll see how to combine them to create a precise search.

Where to Look

Just like Basic Search, Advanced Search lets you tell LibCat how to process your keywords:

Advanced Search also allows you to instruct LibCat to look for your keyword(s) only in certain places:

Language Field

Advanced Search also lets you specify if you want results only in a particular language:

However...

Advanced Search Strength

The strength of Advanced Search is being able to look for different keywords in different places or different ways at the same time to retrieve fewer results to scroll through.

For example, if we do a basic search for fairy tales grimm, we get 45 results, many of which are books about the fairy tales collected by the Grimms:

By using Advanced Search, we can look for fairy tales anywhere, but restrict grimm to the author field, so we only get 14 results:

Why not just do a Basic Search for grimm in the author field?

We get other authors whose last name is Grimm.

Or Brothers Grimm in the author field?

We only get four results! The brothers aren’t listed in the record the way we think of them (The Brothers Grimm), but separately as Grimm, Jacob and Grimm, Wilhelm.