Scotland's Culture: Help

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SCOTLAND'S CULTURE

Advanced search

Advanced search is one of Scotland's Culture's main searching tools. When using the advanced search within the service you will be searching records of electronic resources held in Scotland's Culture. Advanced search lets you search by multiple author, title, and subject keywords, and refine your search by choosing Or, And, or Not. Advanced search also lets you sort your search results by title, author or publication date.

For example:
- if you search using football AND scotland your results will bring back all records which include the terms football AND Scotland, using AND increases your search results.
- if you search using football OR Scotland, using OR increases your search results but the relevance of the results decreases as the search will bring back any resources with the term football OR Scotland.
- if you search using football NOT Scotland this would only bring back records which have the term football, this decreases the the number of search results but increases the relevance of the results.

To do an Advanced search:

Click the Search tab.
Click the Advanced link below the Search tab.
Choose the search index that you want to use from one or more of the Search By drop-down lists.
Enter a search term in the Search box that corresponds to the search index you selected from the Search By drop-down list.
Click the go button.

Tip: You can search for items using "wildcard" symbols. A wildcard is a symbol that represents a group of unknown search symbols or letters.

If you do not know the exact word you want to search for, you may be able to enter part of a word followed by a wildcard symbol. The wildcard symbol is a question mark ( ? ).

For example:
- if you wanted to search for all the authors whose last name begins with the prefix "steven", you would enter "steven?" as the search criteria. Scotland's Culture would return results from authors named "Stevens", "Stevenson", "Stevensen", etc.

Choose the sorting option that you want from the sorting list, these options will sort your search results by either title, author or date of publication.

Scotland's Culture help pages are displayed in a new browser window. You may wish to keep the new window open for further reference, or close it to reduce clutter. You can always display this guide again from the Sitemap page, along with all other help pages.

Some users may find that parts of Scotland’s Culture are inaccessible from within an institution that has firewall protection. This may be because parts of Scotland’s Culture use an untypical port number (8000). To rectify this you should contact your IT department who will be able address the problem.

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Last updated:28 Nov 2003

Date created:28 Nov 2003

Disclaimer.

Scotland's Culture: The partners.

© Scottish Executive/ Scottish Library and Information Council.
Send comments, suggestions and queries about this service to slic4@slainte.org.uk
Scotland's Culture is supported by the Scottish Executive and the Scottish Library and Information Council.