stopwords and boolean operators - ncls and... · the use of double quotation marks forces a search...
TRANSCRIPT
STOP WORDS AND BOOLEAN OPERATORS
and how they
affect searching
in WorkFlows
STOP WORDS
What are “Stop Words”?
Stop Words are words which do not contain
important significance to be used in search queries.
Stop Words are usually articles, prepositions, or conjunctions
such as:
as, at, be, but, by, do, for, if, in, it, of, on, to
BOOLEAN OPERATORS
Boolean operators are words such as and, not, and or.
What are Boolean Operators?
BOOLEAN OPERATOR - AND
AND retrieves records containing all of the specified terms and in one or more
MARC field
Example: Puppy AND Kitten
BOOLEAN OPERATOR - OR
OR retrieves records matching any or all of the specified terms.
Example:
Puppy OR Kitten
BOOLEAN OPERATOR - NOT
NOT retrieves records containing the first search term but not the second.
Example:
Puppy NOT Kitten
OPERATORS AS SEARCH TERMS
There can be problems with using an operator
as a search term instead of as an operator.
Example: “And West is West”
Example: “Hell or high water”
Example: “How not to die”
SINGLE QUOTATION MARKSWHEN SEARCHING
The use of single quotation marks at the beginning and end of your search, forces a search for those words together in a single field, but ignores the stop words (of and the).
Example:
General/Keyword
‘Heart of Texas’
DOUBLE QUOTATION MARKSWHEN SEARCHING
The use of double quotation marks forces a search for those words together, including the stop words in any single field, in any order.
Example:
General/Keyword
“Heart of Texas”
SUBSTITUTION (also known as WILDCARDS) and TRUNCATION symbols
Two such symbols are the question mark (?) and the dollar sign ($)
Example: wom?n Retrieves records containing either "woman" or "women."
Example: Anders?n Retrieves records containing either “Andersen” or “Anderson”
Example: Theat?? Retrieves records containing either “theater” or theatre”
Example: 3? Retrieves records containing anything between 30-39, 3a to 3z, etc.
Example: 197? Retrieves records containing 1970, 1971, 1972, etc.
The Question mark (?)is a substitution symbol
Example: jame$
Retrieves records containing "Jame", "James", "Jameson", "Jamerson"
Example: cook$
Retrieves records containing cook, cooks, cookbook, cooking, etc.
The Dollar sign ($)is a truncation symbol
PAM WILLSHEAD CATALOGER/ACQUISITIONS TRAINER
NORTH COUNTRY LIBRARY SYSTEM
315-755-0651