Basic Search Back to Help
Discovering Collection allows you three basic options for performing a search. Select an option from the pull-down menu at the top of the home screen and select search. The options are as follows:
Enter a term in the search box and choose an option from the pull-down menu and choose search. If you have chosen the subject or keyword search, a list of subject terms most closely matching your criteria will appear on the left hand side of the screen and a list of subjects containing your search terms on the right-hand side of the screen. Often you will see the term you searched for at the top of the list; this indicates that the term is in the Subject Guide's thesaurus. Selecting the term from the subject guide will give you a similar-looking screen, only this time the Subject Guide results will be in hierarchical order: you will see headings and underneath these headings "See". If you click on "See" you will retrieve "Broader Terms," "Related Terms," "Narrower Terms," and/or "See Also" under which there will be more general and more specific, terms. To retrieve results from a Subject Guide entry, select the hyperlinked term.
If you choose the Full-text search option, the subject guide will not appear. Instead you will only receive your tabbed results list.
If no results can be found, you will receive a message asking you to revise your search.
Documents are grouped by data type into the following tabs: Reference, Primary Documents, and Multimedia. Clicking on the labeled tabs allows you to choose the type of document you wish to see. The results list will display the title of the document and its source. Reference and Primary Documents will display according to their relevancy rankings (how many times the term appears in the article). Multimedia results will display alphabetically. You can view the different data type results by clicking on the labeled tab. If the search does not find any results for a specific data type, the tab will be "grayed out" and will not work.