Introduction

Basic Search

Advanced Search Options

• Keyword search
  
• Call number search
• Browse search
• Search only electronic books
• Search only videos

Search Results

• Category analysis (coming soon)
• Copy status
• Cross reference
• Full details
• Printing, e-mailing or viewing
• View options

Navigation

• My account
• Acorn alerts
• Login/Logout

Search Tips

• Searching for Authors
• Searching for Titles
• Searching for Periodical Titles
• Searching for Subjects
• Precise phrase searching
• Substitution and truncation
• Operators
• Operator precedence
• Nesting
• Stopwords
• Standard entry tags
• Searching numbers in a list
• Special characters

Glossary

Help with Acorn

Introduction

Use Acorn to identify the books, periodical titles (but not individual articles), government documents, scores, sound recordings, and other holdings of the nine libraries that comprise Vanderbilt's Jean and Alexander Heard Library.

Acorn offers the ability to search throughtout the database for a word or combination of words (keyword) as well as two options for looking up items in alphabetical indexes of authors, titles, subject headings and series (Begins with and Browse).

Keyword searching

In general, use keyword to search for concepts or for specific items when you do not have complete title or author information.

Keyword searches may be entered on either the Basic Search page or the Advanced Search Options: Keyword Search page.

Basic Search offers: use of Boolean and positional operators, truncation and nesting of search phrases; the option to limit searches to one field; the option to limit searches to the holdings of one library.

Advanced Search offers: all of the Basic Search features above, plus a guided search form; options for limiting searches to a combination of fields; options for limiting searches by publication year, language and library; options for sorting results.

Browse and Begins With

Begins With searches must be entered on the Basic Search page.

Browse searches must be entered on the Advanced Search Options: Browse Search page.

Use Browse and Begins With when you know at least the beginning of the title, author, subject heading, or series of the item you are searching for.

The differences between these two types of seaches are slight. Begins With offers more specificity because it retrieves only a finite set of matching headings. Browse offers more flexibility because it allows infinite scrolling through the index you select.