Research Guides: NBLA Catalog Navigation Guide: Search Tips

Overview

Search Tips

This page will go over some search tips for searching our collections.

For instructions and screen shots for how to use our Simple and Advanced Search Functions see these pages: Simple Search and Advanced Search.

For explanations of the various collection and item types used by our library as filters in the catalog see our Collections Overview page.

See our Common Issues and Workarounds page for tips if encounter any system errors or issues.

If you have any suggestions about anything you think should be included in the guide or would like a workaround for please fill out this feedback form.

Quick Search Tips

How do I…

…find books or archives material?

The default search is to search or browse Everything the online catalog, which includes library and archival collections at NBLA and archival collections worldwide related to the physical sciences. You can limit your search using the first drop down menu in the search bar to select either Books or Archival Material.

Books and Publications at NBLA includes all published materials held at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, such as textbooks, journals, and rare books.
Archives at NBLA includes all primary source items and collections physically held by NBLA.
Archives Worldwide - International Catalog of Sources includes archival collections related to the history of the physical sciences held at NBLA and other repositories worldwide. See the International Catalog of Sources (ICOS) page in this guide for more information.

…find a specific material type?

To filter for materials of a specific type, you can use the catalog’s “Limits” feature in the Advanced Search. For a full explanation of the available collection limits see the Collections Overview page of this guide. Helpful limits include:

Oral Histories -- Search or browse our oral history collection
Special Collections --- Rare Books held at NBLA
Manuscript Biographies -- Unpublished memoirs and autobiographies of scientists

…find records of organizations?

To find records created by an organization, such as a professional society or a research institution. Search for the institution’s name as “Author” will return a list including the institution and all of its subordinate units which have produced records. Click the desired creator to see a list of titles.

For member society organization records, check out our Member Society Portals which allow you to browse the collection items related to specific societies.

Keyword Searching

Tip: Use advanced search if you want to search for words in different fields.

The "All Fields" searches for words together in a single field at a time rather than individual words appearing in different fields. Thus if you want to search for an Author Name AND a Subject keyword, you will get limited results since they are not in the same field. Instead use the advanced search or field rags to search keywords in two fields at the same time.

Example: A simple keyword search of “Einstein, relativity” will yield titles like “The Einstein theory of relativity” but it will not yield “The meaning of relativity” by Albert Einstein

Note: Since author names are sometimes in the title field, you can sometimes get results by searching an author and title keyword at the same time, but generally it is best to either use the advanced search to combine Title, Author, and Subject searches or search for keywords in only one field at a time and use the limits to narrow down later.

Wild Cards

Tip: Search with simple queries and use facets to narrow results

This catalog interface does not support Boolean searching (e.g. AND, OR, NOT) or Wildcards (e.g. *, %). To make complex queries, use the advanced search (which operates like an AND search for each field). If you need to do an OR search, use our Classic Catalog.

Special Characters and Punctuation

Accents and Special Characters:

Tip: Include special characters (such as accent marks, diacritics, umlauts, apostrophes) in searches when expected.

If you do not have the ability to add special characters from your keyboard, you can use the built in Character Map (on Windows) or Symbol Viewer (on Macs), or copy and paste from another source such as an online Unicode table (e.g. Wikipedia or Symbl)

Note on Punctuation Marks:

In general, punctuation marks are not directly searchable in the catalog, however you should still include them as a place holder since they will treated like a space in a search query. [Note the exception is apostrophes ('), which are directly searchable since they sometimes act as a special character).

Punctuation characters that are treated as a space (" "): question marks (?), hyphens (-), asterisks (*), exclamation points (!), colons (:), commas (,), quotation marks ("")

Examples:

Hyphens: "Inter-American" is equivalent to a search for "Inter American" and would return the same results.

Colon: A search for the call number C3:9 would result in the same matches as a search for C3 9.

Foreign Scripts

For books in foreign languages with a Latin-based script (e.g. German, French, Italian, Polish etc.):

Use accent marks and special characters commonly used in those languages to search. Titles and authors will reflect the form of the title on the item.

Books in Foreign Languages with non-Latin-based scripts (e.g. Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Thai)

Historically, due to limitations of previous catalog systems in rendering and being able to search non-Latin based characters, materials at NBLA were traditionally cataloged with a Romanized version of titles, authors, and publication information rather than the native script. While efforts are underway to add additional access points for these records in their native script, the majority of the records still only have the Romanized title. Thus searching for the title in the native script will yield no results.

The Romanizations were done following the Library of Congress Romanization standards, which can be used to construct a Romanized title for your search. It may be helpful to search for authors or use the browse and limit feature by language to explore these collections, if you are unsure of the spelling for the title.

Note that more recently cataloged items particularly in Russian, Chinese, and Japanese, have been cataloged in the native script with Romanized titles appearing as a secondary access point. Thus for these titles, a search in either the native script or the Romanized version will yield results.