Advanced Search

The Advanced Search option enables the user to perform a more detailed and specific search of the library data using Boolean logic. Boolean logic uses the words And and Or to allow the user to perform complex searches.

To access the Advanced Search click on Advanced Search at the top right of the screen.

The Advanced Search window will then appear where you can start creating your advanced search. Start by using the drop down menus at the top of the window to select criteria you wish to add into your search.

·From the Field menu, select the field you wish to search on. In this example, we select "Type"

·Next, choose the Operator from the available options in the combo box. Note that the options shown in the Operator box will vary depending on the data type of the field selected from the Field box. For instance, should the field be a numeric field, you will receive Less than and greater than, whereas these operators will not show when the Type field is selected.

In this example the Equal to operator is selected:

·In the Value box, enter the value you wish to look for. When certain fields are selected, you will have the ability to choose from a drop down menu but for others you must type in the value. In this example, the value Book is selected.

·Click Add to append the details entered into the Field, Operator and Value boxes to your search.

·When you have added all desired criteria, click Apply to perform the search.

The above steps demonstrate a relatively simple, advanced search but they can get quite complex when more and more criteria is added. To add additional criteria, repeat the steps above but toggle the Boolean option, depending on whether you wish to append a Boolean And or Or search. Further to the example above, let us assume that we wished to refine it further to show resources of type Book and Film.

·Click Advanced Search to re-open the Advanced Search window. Notice also how the previous search criteria is retained.

·Select the Boolean drop down and choose Or.

Note that the OR boolean option has been selected. You may be wondering why not the AND option. This is because here we are searching for resources that belong to either Film or Book. A resource cannot belong to more than one resource type. Should we select AND, the system would attempt to search for resources belonging to both resource types (i.e. Film and Book). Therefore, no results would be displayed.

·In the Field and Operator drop down menus, choose Type and Equal To, respectively then select Film from the value drop down.

·Click Add and see how the search is appended to the grid.

Brackets

You can also use brackets to group parts of queries together. Following from the example above, suppose we also wanted to search for resources that had a keyword of "Weather" and resources that fall into the resource types; Book and Film. We would firstly need to append the keyword search to the list. We do this by adding AND > Keywords > including > weather:

Left in the current state, the advanced search above would show a lot more resources than the ones we are looking for. For instance, it will show resources that are of the Book or Film resource type and all resources that contain a keyword of "weather" (irrespective of their resource type). To show only books or films that have contain a keyword of "weather" we must use brackets to group the resource types together.

To add a left bracket, first click the row you wish to append the left bracket to:

With the row highlighted, click the left bracket symbol.

The bracket will then be appended to the row:

Repeat this process and add the closing bracket after the film resource type. The final query will look like this: