William W. Winpisinger: Education & Technology Center

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Quick Search

ACTIVE COLLECTION IS MUSIC Contact the Librarian Go Back Start Over
P> Search Terms
Searching with a Single Search Term
Truncated and Exact Searches
Limiting a Search
Advanced Search

Before Webserver can help you find library materials, you must tell it what type of materials you need. You do this from the Quick Search screen. The Quick Search screen is the first screen you see when you connect to Webserver.

Like Athena, Webserver will search only one collection at a time. This collection is called the active collection. Notice that Webserver displays the name of the active collection at the top of the screen. If you want to search a different collection, you must change the active collection. For instructions, see Changing Collections.

Search Terms

Before Webserver will perform a search, you must tell it what to search for. To do this, you need to enter one or more search terms.

What is a Search Term?

A search term is a word or a phrase, or part of a word or phrase, that you want Webserver to search for. It can be an author's name, a complete title, a subject, a publisher, or any other piece of bibliographic or copy information.

Searching with a Single Search Term

Although you can use up to three search terms to specify a search, often one is all you need.

To illustrate this, let's specify a search for all library items related to whales.

To specify a search on whales:

  1. Select the text box (there is only one) by clicking on it. Type WHALES.
  2. If the ALL INDEXES radio button is not selected, select it now by clicking on it.
  3. Click the SEARCH button. If the active collection contains any titles related to the term whales, Webserver will display the search results.

Webserver lists title, author, call number and status information for each item related to the search term whales. You can move through the list by clicking on the NEXT and PREVIOUS buttons.

Notice that there is an icon (a picture of a book, cassette, CD-ROM, etc.) located to the left of each title. If you need to see more information about a particular title, click on its icon. Webserver will show you a full description of that item.

For a more detailed explanation of the Search Results screen, see Displaying the Search Results.

To return to the Quick Search screen:

  1. Click the START OVER button, or use your Web browser's Back feature.

Truncated and Exact Searches

Like Athena, Webserver can perform two types of searches, exact and truncated. In a truncated search Webserver will search for information that starts with the letters in your search term. For example, if you search on DOL, Webserver will find items related to dolls, dolphins, etc.

In an exact search, Webserver will search only for information that is identical to your search term. This means that you must type the entire search term. For example, to search on dolphins, you must type the complete word dolphins. Typing DOL would not be sufficient.

Which Type of Search Does Webserver Use?

This will depend on how your library has set the Default Search Behavior parameter from within Athena. If this parameter is set to exact, Webserver will perform exact searches. If this parameter is set to truncated, Webserver will perform truncated searches.

Can I Temporarily Request a Different Search Type?

Yes. If your Default Search Behavior parameter is set to truncated, you can still specify an exact search. Similarly, if the parameter is set to exact, you can still specify a truncated search.

To specify an exact search on the search term cat:

Note:You will need to do this only if the Default Search Behavior parameter is set to truncated.
  1. From the Quick Search screen, type CAT. as the search term. (Make sure you include the period. It tells Webserver that this should be an exact search.)
  2. Click the SEARCH button.

To specify a truncated search on the search term cat:

Note:

You will need to do this only if the Default Search Behavior parameter is set to exact.
  1. From the Quick Search screen, type CAT* as the search term. (Make sure you include the asterisk. It tells Webserver that this should be a truncated search.)
  2. Click the SEARCH button.

Limiting a Search

Sometimes the search term that you want to use has a very broad scope. It might have several meanings, or it might apply to a number of different areas. Although such a search term might be valid, it would most likely generate many items, only a few of which would be of interest to you.

For example, you might want to find a book written by Trudy West. If you used West as the search term, Webserver would find not only items written by Trudy West, but also items published in West Nyack, New York; items about the Middle West; and every item that had the word west in its title. Although the book by Trudy West would be included in the search results list, there might be so many other items in this list that you could have a difficult time spotting the book you want.

In this situation, it is best to tell Webserver to look only for items whose author's name is West. This is called limiting the search. From the Quick Search screen, you can limit a search to author, title or subject.

Tip If you want to limit a search to something else say - a series or a publisher - you can. For more information, see Advanced Search.

To illustrate the effect of limiting a search, let's perform three searches using the search term west.

To search on the word west and limit the search to titles:

  1. From the Quick Search screen, type WEST in the text box.
  2. Click the TITLE radio button.
  3. Click the SEARCH button. If the active collection contains any titles with the word west in the title, you will see the search results. Notice that every item in the search results has west in its title.

To search on the word west and limit the search to subjects:

  1. From the Quick Search screen, type WEST in the text box.
  2. Click the SUBJECT radio button.
  3. Click the SEARCH button. If the active collection contains any titles with the word west in their subject information, you will see the search results.

Notice that the search results are quite different than they were after the previous search. Since this search was limited to subject, Webserver will have found only those items with west in one or more subject heading.

To search on the word west and limit the search to author:

  1. From the Quick Search screen type WEST in the text box.
  2. Click the AUTHOR radio button.
  3. Click the SEARCH button. If the active collection contains any titles written by someone named West you will see the search results.

Again, the search results will be quite different than they were after the earlier two searches. Since this search was limited to author, Webserver will have found only those items written by someone named West.

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