The Simple Search is the main search bar at the top of the homepage. It is set by default to search all collections (Everything) for keywords that appear in a field within the record (All Fields).
You can use the drop downs to limit your search to a specific collection (such as just the Books and publications at NBLA or Oral Histories) and a specific field if your keyword only applies to say an Author or Title Keyword.
Note: The default keyword search assumes that all the terms you are searching for will appear together in the same field, such as the Title or Description field. If your keywords are meant to appear in different fields, such as a keyword for the Author combined with a keyword for the Subject, the search will be less effective. This simple search equivalent to doing a search in the "Find Items that have All these words" in the Advanced Search. If you would like to look for a terms across different fields within the record, use either the Advanced Search or Field Tags which will be explained below.
Example: A simple keyword search of Einstein relativity will yield results like “The Einstein theory of relativity” but it will not yield “The meaning of relativity” by Albert Einstein.
This page will show you how to craft some searches using the Simple Search.
Field Tags are a way to allow you to search for multiple terms across different fields of a catalog record. These are equivalent to using the Additional Limit Title, Author, and Subject Searches in the Advanced Search.
Available Field Tags are:
TITLE=
AUTHOR=
SUBJECT=
Words after the equals (=) sign will only be searched in that field. You can look for a specific phrase using "quotes"
For example:
If you wanted to find items relating to Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr, you might use the field tags to search:
Pauli SUBJECT=Bohr
This will search all fields (including description, author, subject) for a mention of "Pauli" and only the Subject field for "Bohr".
For Correspondence from Pauli to Bohr you might use:
AUTHOR=Pauli SUBJECT=Bohr
A note about searching for "Niels Bohr" -- since we are the "Niels Bohr Library & Archives," a general keyword search for "Bohr" will give you results for records that have the name of the library in the description, regardless of whether the item has to do with Niels Bohr, so it is generally good to specify a field to search Bohr's name when possible to limit false results.
You can also use the minus sign (-) to exclude keywords from your search (see note in the Advanced Search).
The two dropdown menus allow you to specify what collection and type of search you are doing. This is a good way to narrow your search if you know exactly what you are looking for or want to browse a certain collection.
Tip : Hitting search without a search term in the bar will browse of everything of the collection type you have specified.
The "Everything" dropdown menu allows you to select which collection you are searching. It is useful if you want to look for only one type of item, such as books or oral histories. For a full rundown of the various options in this menu and what they search, see the Collections Overview page of this guide. If you wish to search a combination of specific collections, use the limit checkboxes in the Advanced Search instead.
The "All Fields" menu allows you to specify what type of keyword you are searching. Items below with *** are available as field tags. The options are:
You can modify your search using the following punctuation:
Double Quotes (" ") -- lets you search a specific phrase or combination of words. Equivalent to "This exact phrase" search in the Advanced Search.
Example: To search for items about cosmic rays, you might use quotes:
"cosmic rays"
This will search the phrase as a unit rather than cosmic rays, which would search for "cosmic" and "rays" separately.
Minus sign ( - ) lets you exclude terms from your search results. Equivalent to "These unwanted terms" in the Advanced search.
Example: To search for items about Niels Bohr separately from NBLA, you might use:
niels bohr -library
This looks for records with the terms "Niels" and "Bohr" but would exclude any matches that also contained the word "library".
Note: This catalog does not support wildcard searches so using special characters like * or ? will only search for that character rather than as a placeholder. If you need to perform wildcard or truncated searches, we recommend using our Classic Catalog.