-> How to: Search in the TUJ Library Catalog

To get started with basic searching in the TUJ library catalog, simply type your keyword(s) into the search bar and click the magnifying glass icon.

Keywords can be anything - a specific title, an author's name, a topic you're researching, a genre, etc.

The catalog automatically searches across everything Temple University Japan Campus students and faculty have access to.  This includes the TUJ library's physical collections and all of Temple University's electronic resources.

When you run a basic search, the system is looking for your keywords anywhere in the metadata contained in the catalog record, in fields such as the title, author, abstract, description, table of contents, subject headings, etc.  It's important to remember that you are not performing a "deep" search or "full-text" search across every word contained in the actual book or article itself.

In advanced search mode, you can specify where in the catalog record you want your keywords to be found.  You can also combine multiple keywords or sets of keywords in various ways to construct very specific search criteria.

This can be especially helpful when you are searching for a known item and you already have a title and author, or a specific ISBN or ISSN.  It is also useful when you are looking a specific type of resource or within a certain date range of publication.

Here is an example of what an advanced search looks like for a specific title and specific author:

Sometimes searching successfully can be as simple as entering a few keywords and filtering your results, but sometimes your results will be contain too many results that aren't relevant and too few results that are.  When that happens, it can be very useful to use the strategies below to construct more precise search strings.

Learning to use the these tools will save you time and make you a more efficient researcher.

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Searching for Exact Phrases

The easiest way to introduce more precision into your search is to learn how to indicate that your keywords are actually a phrase.

If you enter multiple keywords into the search bar, the system treats each word as a separate target.  Sometimes that is what you want, but when it isn't, you can wrap your words in "quotation marks" to lock them together as a phrase.  When you use quotation marks, the system will only return results that include the specified words in the specified order, with no other words in between.

Alternatively, you can use the advanced search and select "equals exact phrase" from drop-down list in between the field selector and the space where you type in your search terms:

This strategy is especially useful when you are looking for a specific title or when you have a multi-word topic with components that occur frequently on their own or have very different meanings individually.

For example:

"Star Wars"

"climate change"

"social media"

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Combining Keywords with Boolean Operators

When you enter multiple keywords into the search bar, there are a few special words you can include to tell the system exactly how you want the keywords to be interpreted in relation to each other.  These are called Boolean operators, and you should always type them in all capital letters to make sure the system interprets them correctly.

Using the following operators between two keywords has the following effect:

AND - tells the system you want results that contain both words

OR - tells the system you want results that contain one keyword or the other keyword, or both

NOT - tells the system you want results that contain the first keyword but do not contain the second keyword

In practice, this looks like:

cats AND dogs -> returns records that contain both the term cats and the term dogs

cats OR dogs -> returns records that contain cats, dogs, or both

cats NOT dogs -> returns records that contain cats, but not dogs

Note that by default, if you search for multiple keywords and don't include any Boolean operators, the system will assume you intended to run an AND search and will look for records that contain all of your keywords.

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Controlling the Order of Operations with Parentheses

If you enter a search string containing multiple keywords and Boolean operators, the system will interpret your search string from left to right.  Sometimes this does not yield the results you expected.  In order to control which actions are performed first, you can use parentheses to cluster your terms.  The system will perform the actions inside the parentheses first, and then perform the actions between or outside the parentheses.

In practice, this looks like:

(cats OR dogs) AND wild

(cats OR dogs) AND (wild OR endangered)

(cats OR dogs) NOT domestic

To see how this can impact search results, try running each of the searches above first with the parentheses, and then without the parentheses.

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Expand a Keyword with Wildcards

Sometimes you may be searching for a topic where many closely related variants of a keyword exist.  One way to include all of the variants is to use a lot of OR statements, but an elegant alternative is to use wildcards to represent the part of the word(s) where the variation occurs.  The library catalog recognizes two specific wildcard characters:

* -> an asterisk represents one or more characters, and is most commonly used in situations where there is a word stem that may have multiple variant endings.  This strategy is called truncation.

? -> a question mark represents a single character, and is most commonly used within a word where there may be variant spellings

In practice, this looks like:

music* -> returns results that include music, musician, musicians, musical, musically, musica, etc.

wom?n -> returns results that include woman, women, womxn, and womyn

organi?ation -> returns results that include organization (American English spelling) and organisation (British English spelling)

Truncation is a powerful tool, but use it with caution!  Depending on the word stem you use, you may end up casting a much broader net than you intended:

cat* -> returns results that include all words that begin with "cat": cat, cats, catnip, catastrophe, catastrophic, catatonic, category, Catholic, catalyst, cataract, etc.

Sometimes, the system will recognize your keyword or search term as one that has a more scholarly equivalent that is more likely to appear in catalog records.  When that happens, it will automatically expand your search to include both terms.  You will see a note at the top telling you that this has happened, and you'll always have the option to revert the search to only include the search term that you typed into the search bar.

For example, in everyday conversation we typically use the term "heart attack" to describe a condition whose official medical name is "myocardial infarction".  If you search for "heart attack", the library catalog will automatically expand your search to include the medical term.  To reject the automatic expansion, click on the link that says "Just search for heart attack".