Quick Author, Title, Subject, or Call Number Search

To quickly search the catalog for author, title, subject, or call number, you can use the first search dropdown to select the category you would like to search.

Default Search Behavior

By default the catalog searches keywords through the entire record, regardless of capitalization, commas, and periods. So the search james, patterson will return the same results as James Patterson although they are ordered and capitalized differently.

Results will be returned that match any of your search terms, with items containing more of your terms, or your terms more times, being ranked higher.

The index includes format types for each record, so you can skip choosing a format and just search for avengers dvd.

Exact Phrases

To search for an exact phrase it should be wrapped by quotations like this:
"last song." vs last song
"white queen" vs white queen

Operators

Because "and" and "or" are words you may wish to search for, to combine your search terms, use AND or OR in all caps. AND shows only results that match both / all your terms.
herbalists fiction  vs herbalists AND fiction note that the top results are the same.

Specific Fields

To search in specific fields use the field name and a colon symbol (:), then the term to match on like this:

author:douglas adams
title:two cities
author:kennedy AND subjects:biography AND pub_year:2009
pub_info:fifth avenue press callnums:nonfiction AND dogs

Common fields are title, author, subjects, publisher (pub_info), callnums (call number) and pub_year (publication year).

Browse by Format

Want to browse our full collection of Tools or Art Prints? Select your desired format from the dropdown menu (by default, the dropdown is set to "All Formats"), and then type * into the search bar and hit enter. This retrieves a full list of items within the selected format in our catalog. 

There's still lots of tuning to be done! Is the search not behaving the way you'd expect? Have an idea to make it work better? Please contact us!