The search screen
QuickSearch / Advanced Search / QuickSets
The basic search option in MetaLib is perfectly simple : one Google-style box, where you can type a keyword or words. Click one of the radio buttons to choose a resource to search in ... for example, try finding the materials by or about the West African theologian Kwame Bediako in our Morton Library catalog. Click on the Go button.
It's not possible in QuickSearch to specify what kind of a term you are entering, whether it is an author's name, a subject heading or whatever. (See Advanced Search for that option.) This is a "keyword anywhere" search, which will make a match with your term anywhere in the records of your chosen catalogs or databases.
You will receive a summary of your search results, showing the number of records in which Kwame Bediako's name appears. To see a list of the results, click on View retrieved. The records are listed in order of relevance ranking. But if you would rather see them organized by another criterion -- publication date, for instance -- you can choose this from the small drop-down menu labelled Sort by:
You can view the full bibliographic record for any of these works by clicking on its title. To return to the list of works, click on Table View.
QuickSets
Note the rest of the gray area below the search box. That area contains a number of resources you may choose to search, along with our own Morton Library catalog. There are groups of databases in religion, bibliographic databases, and catalogs of other nearby academic libraries -- member institutions of the Richmond Academic Libraries Consortium, the Washington Theological Consortium, and so on.
These groups of resources are known as QuickSets. To see exactly which resources are included, click on the name of a QuickSet, and a box will open, detailing its contents. To choose a particular set of resources to search, click on one of the radio buttons.
You can also create your own customized QuickSets. To learn how to do this, see Make your own QuickSets for searching.
