Time at the desk? Play with these commands in the catalog!

Hi all,

If you have a little time on your hands, enter the catalog tab and play with some of the recently available search commands (below) that could make your life easier.

Reminders

Quotation marks    vital for searching a phrase and forcing OCLC to ignore problematic symbols like & and -, for instance ""transcultural nursing: assessment & intervention"

AND   not always needed, but you must capitalize it or use the +

OR   capitalize it. If you can find the vertical line symbol on your keyboard, that's the shortcut

NOT capitalize it or use the - symbol

If you like using commands to search within fields, test some of the exciting possibilities listed in OCLC's expert search commands

Keyword search for aristotle as an author or a contributor and the word ethics in one of the title fields include ToC

au: aristotle AND ti:ethics

Recently-available field search commands

nu: is the "partial call number search" command. 

You may try a full, exact call number.  But you must omit all spaces.  I've seen some incorrect "no items found" messages, but play around with this. If you get that message, try these steps: omit the year, truncate the call number.

Wow, the following search in the catalog tab just found this book for me! 

nu:B407.L661943

IF that search hadn't worked, I could use the truncation symbol to search part of the call number. No results found? Keep backing the truncation symbol up to broaden the search :)

nu:B407.L66*

b8: is a shelf location search. Want to narrow a search to gov docs or scua?  Just add b8:  and a keyword from the location info in the catalog.  Can be combined with other field commands.

ti:"nursing homes" AND b8:government documents

Note that b8:reference doesn't work very well because there are piles of false hits from records with  "ask at reference desk" in the location.

OCLC search help is a little scattered but search guidelines and expert search commands are two good places to look.  Both are linked in the Tutorials tab of the worldcat local libguide.

If you're interested in these commands, please let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Lea