Searching Acorn using the Item Search and Display Wizard

EXPLANATION OF SEARCHES

Each of the specific searches in the drop-down menu look at certain fields in the bibliographic record. The table below shows the specific searches and the fields that apply.

Author: 100,110,111,700,710,711.
Title: 130,245,246,440,730,740
Subject: 600,610,611,630,650,651,690,691
Series: 400,410,411,440,490,800,810,811,830,840
Periodical: same as title, but limited to SERIAL format records.
General: searches all keyword indexed fields. Includes numerical fields such as 001,010,020,022,035. (Acorn no., LCCN, ISBN, ISSN, OCLC).

Call number: searches the call number in the item record.
Item ID: searches the barcode number in the item record.
Title control #: searches the Acorn number of the title record.

NOTE: These fields appear in the Item Search and Display wizard specifically. If you are searching from the Modify Order wizard, different fields will be included such as Order ID and Packing List.

COMBINATION SEARCHES

You can do combination searches with the IS&D wizard in the following manner:
Make sure that the radio button is set to "Search" and the index is set to "General" :

twain {AU} and huckleberry finn {TI}

The curly-bracketed "AU" and "TI" terms refer to the author and title indexes.
Searches can be done this way using AU, TI, SER, PER, SU (Capitalization of these index terms is optional). As in the example above, you can use one word or several for each index search.
You can also use this format to qualify a search by publication date:

huckleberry finn {TI} and {PBYR} =1973

You must use the =, <, or > symbols before the date for "equal to", "earlier than", and "later than". You can combine these symbols as well, such as:

huckleberry finn {TI} and {PBYR} >= 1973

This would search for the title published in 1973 or later. Spacing is important in this type of search. There has to be a space before the ">", no space between it and the "=", and then a space before the year. Also, the "<" or ">" has to come before the "=".

QUALIFYING SEARCHES

You can qualify your searches by using the "Set Options of Item Lookup" helper. Click on the helper and go to the "Search" tab. There you will see that you can limit your searches by several options. Remember, though, that once you set these limits, they will stay there until you get out of the wizard and back in. So, if you set a limit to format SERIAL, all titles that you search without re-opening the wizard will still be limited that way.

SORTING RESULTS LISTS

You can sort the arrangement of your search results in various ways by setting them in the Search tab of the "Set Options for Item Lookup" helper. If the option is set to "none", the results will display in last in/first out order. In other words, the newest records added to Acorn will show at the top of the results list. Setting the option to "Reverse Pub Year" will give the results by newest publication date at the top. This works if you already have a results list that you are working with as well. If you have a list of Huckleberry Finn titles and you want to change the way the results are sorted, click on "Lookup Another", click on the "Set Options for Item Lookup" helper, change your sort option and click OK. When you click on OK again to do the search again, your results will sort differently.

NUMERICAL SEARCHES

Searching for numbers such as ISBN, ISSN and OCLC must be done using the Search General index. Make sure that the radio button is set to "Search" and the index set to "General" then put in the number with no spaces or hyphens. An exception to this is the ISSN number which must include a hyphen after the first 4 digits: 1612-6345.

EXACT PHRASE SEARCHES

If you want to search a phrase using Search, you can put the phrase in single quotes: 'huckleberry finn'. This will find the phrase in any indexed field in the bibliographic record. However, in most cases, you would probably just use the Search Title, Browse Title, or Exact Title for these searches.

SERIES SEARCHES

The two searches SERIES and PERIODICAL TITLE differ in that searching by SERIES will give you titles that are part of a series and PERIODICAL TITLE will give you the bibliographic record for the series itself. For instance, searching the series title "Loeb classical library" as a SERIES gives you 390 items because it is giving you every individual title in that series, but searching as a PERIODICAL TITLE gives you only one hit, which is the record for the series title itself. So, think of the PERIODICAL TITLE search as being a SERIES TITLE search instead.

BROWSE SEARCHES

Setting the radio button to "Browse" instead of "Search" will allow similar searches, but the results will display differently. Often you will get put into a heading display and then have to do another step to actually see the titles you are looking for. That is why it is probably better to use the "Search" instead.

_____________________________________________________________
All of the above information is available in the help files that are associated with the IS&D wizard. At any point in your searching, you can click on the question mark button on your toolbar and go to the help files. The files are content specific, so you will be taken to help that applies to what you are doing at the moment. There is much more information that is not covered here in the help files, so please refer to them as needed.

nbk 8/23/2004