Friday, February 4, 2011

T*ps for Search?ng

When searching on our Catalogue, 'wildcard' characters which can be useful to find the book or journal you're looking for - the two to remember are ? and *
  • ? represents a single character
  • * represents many characters.
These can be used in different ways, either in the middle of a word or at the end:
  • If you didn't know whether an author's surname was spelt Smith or Smyth, you could include results for both spellings by typing Sm?th.
  • In a Keyword or Title search entering educat* would return results for education, educator, educating etc. This can be useful if you're not sure of the title or if you just want to broaden your search to include variations of a word.
These wildcards work similarly in many of our online resources though there are some variations in how they are treated.