FAQs

Search Strategy Help

Phrase Searching

Wildcard Use

• Searches within PowerSearch can be performed using the wildcards “?” and “*”.
• The question mark (?) will match any one character. For example, wom?n will retrieve woman or women.
• The asterisk (*) will match zero or more characters at the end of a word.  For example, politic* will retrieve politic, politics, political, politician, etc.
• Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a search.

Boolean Operators

• PowerSearch supports the use of the following Boolean operations: OR, NOT.
• By default, all terms in a search are combined with the AND operator.
• The operators must be entered in ALL CAPS to be recognized as Boolean operators rather than search terms.
• The OR operator can be used to expand the results set.  For example, survey OR questionnaire, will return items that contain either term.
• Use quotation marks to specifically search for phrases such as “middle ages”.
• To exclude items in PowerSearch, use the NOT operator before a term. For example: engines NOT combustion. The results will not include the term “combustion”.

Searching Specific Fields

• The single search box in PowerSearch will search across many fields automatically.  Or you can search a particular field by using the syntax: “field:(query).” For example, a search for subjectterms:(mainstreaming in education), finds records that contain that particular subject heading.

Searchable fields:

• Title
• SubjectTerms
• Author
• Publisher
• PublicationTitle
• Notes
• ISBN
• ISSN

Browser Support

• PowerSearch supports the following browsers and phones:
• Internet Explorer 6.0+
• Firefox 3.6.0+
• Safari 4.0+
• Chrome (stable version)
• iPhone 2.0+
• BlackBerry 8500+
• Android 1.0+