Limit your search
Doing a keyword search in our collection can bring up a lot of records, sometimes thousands. It can be very helpful to target your search to certain kinds of materials, or to certain portions of our extensive collection.
On our initial search screen, please note the set of options labelled Limit search to: just below the Search for a keyword area.
You can choose to limit your search by language. Perhaps you wish to retrieve only the records for materials in our collection written in French, or Spanish, or Korean. Use the drop-down menu beside the word Language to make this choice.
You may want to limit your search to a certain special collection within our Library : the Rare books, or Reference, or the Children's books. Use the drop-down menu beside the word Location to make that choice.
Perhaps you would like to see only the most recent publications. You can use the Year from and Year to boxes to enter chosen publication dates: say, 2000 through 2005.
The drop-down menu labelled Material Types can be used to select only particular kinds of items in our collection: videos for example, or DVDs, audio cassettes, and so on.
Use these limiters in conjunction with the keyword search just above them on the screen. These limiters do not apply to browse searches, only to keyword searches.
It's also helpful to notice the Words adjacent choice in the Search for a keyword area.
Many technical terms in theology and religious studies are expressed in a phrase or combination of words, such as liberation theology, christian education or church history. If you click on the little button beside Yes in the Words adjacent area, your search will be limited to records in which those words appear together as a phrase, not just as individual words appearing anywhere in the record.
The Words adjacent option is also available on the Advanced Search screen, and there you can combine a phrase with another search term: for example, liberation theology as a keyword, and Africa as another keyword.
