Journalism - OLD SEPT 23: Search

Performing searches

You can search very easily in Locate. Just type one or more words you are looking for and click the Search button.

Locate assumes that you are searching for all the words you type unless OR or NOT are specified between the words and phrases.

Once you are familiar with the basic Locate search, you might want to try doing more with the search panel or use the Advanced Search option. Both of these options offer numerous features for making your searches more precise and enable you to get results that are more useful.

Selecting Resource Types

Once you’ve run your search, you can select what type of resources you want to appear in your results by using the drop down menu.

Books, Journals & Media will show print and electronic books, journals and video content.

Article Search searches across multiple databases to find matching journal articles.

How can I do more with the Search Panel?

You can do more than just a simple search with the search panel. Try the following search options to get the best results for your search:

Searching for a phrase

To search for a phrase, type quotation marks around the phrase. You can combine both words and phrases in your search.

If you do not enclose the phrase with quotation marks, the system will find items that contain the individual words in the phrase, regardless of whether these words are located next to each other in the order specified.

For example, to search for global warming as one term, type the following in the search box:

Searching for any specified words or phrase

You can search for items that contain at least one of the words or phrases you type in the Search box. To do so, type OR between the words or phrases.

If you search for words or phrases without specifying OR or NOT, Locate assumes that you are searching for all the specified words or phrases.

For example, to search for items with the word Irish or the word Celtic, type the following in the search box:

Searching using wildcard characters

You can include the following wildcard characters in your searches:

? — enter a question mark to perform a single character wildcard search. For example, type wom?n to search for records that contain the strings woman, women, and so forth.

* — enter an asterisk, to perform a multiple character wildcard search. This will search for the start of the word and any alternative endings. For example, type cultur* to search for records that contain strings, such as culture, cultural, and culturally.

The system ignores wildcard characters placed at the beginning of search terms. For example, the system treats the search terms ?aying and *aying as if you had searched for aying.

Grouping terms within a query

You can use parentheses (brackets) to group terms within a query. For example, to search for Shakespeare and either tragedy or sonnet, type the following in the search box:

Using the Article Search scope

Article Search is a centralised search index that encompasses tens of millions of records of global or regional significance that are harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators. This allows you to search multiple databases at the same time. To search from these resources, enter your search terms into the search bar and select the Article option.

You can also switch your results list between “Books, Journals and Media” and “Articles”.

The default setting of the search will only include results that the library has full-text access to. To expand you results beyond the library’s collections select the “Expand beyond library collections” option. 

Searching Newspapers

Newspaper search searches across 1 billion newspaper articles, from hundreds of newspapers. You can also view articles from featured newspapers. To find newspapers, click the more options button, then select Newspapers

You can also switch your results list between “Newspapers” and “Featured Newspapers”.

The default setting of the search will only include results that the library has full-text access to. To expand you results beyond the library’s collections select the “Expand beyond library collections” option.