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Finding Books: Advanced Catalogue Searching

How to combine search strategies to locate more specific books on your topic.

Using advanced search

If you find that your basic searches aren’t focused enough, try doing an ADVANCED search. An Advanced search allows you to combine different search strategies on one search screen. Advanced search allows you to search by author, title, subject, note or any field. An any field search can be useful as the search terms you enter will be located no matter where they are found in the catalogue record.

  • In the Catalogue, click ADVANCED Search.
  • On the first line, type in a word or phrase that you are interested in researching (e.g., sports medicine).  You may choose to limit to a particular field, such as WORD, TITLE or AUTHOR.
  • Put multiple words in quotation marks to keep the words together (e.g., "sports medicine")
  • On the second line, type in another word or phrase (e.g. Canada). You may choose to limit to a particular field, such as WORD, TITLE or AUTHOR.
  • Continue filling out the other lines if needed.
  • You may also choose to limit results by material type, or to include materials from a specific locationlanguage or time frame. For example, if you want to limit to only e-books, choose "e-book" as an option in Material Type.

The advanced search will return a list of items containing all of your search terms. Click on the most relevant to see items closely related to your topic.

Formulating Your Search Strategy