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Help with Acorn

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 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.

Precise Phrase Searching

Designate a set of terms as a phrase by enclosing the expression in single quotes. This enclosed search expression must be matched in the catalog exactly as typed.

Substitution or truncation is used when you are unsure of the spelling of a word or when you want to get variations of a word.

The symbol for a single character is ?; for multiple characters use $. If you follow the $ symbol with a number, Unicorn limits the number of characters matched.

To literally search these symbols/characters, enclose them with double quotation marks.

this search: finds:
speak$ speak or speaks or speaker or speakers
cat? cat or cats or cate (but not catatonic or catastrophe)
wom?n woman or women or womyn
wom?n$ woman or women or womyn or woman's or womens or womanhood or womanly, etc.
wint$3 winter or winters or wintry (but not winterson or winterthur)

At least one character must precede the symbol.

Operators

If you type more than one word into the search box, Acorn searches for the words in the SAME FIELD of the Acorn record.

To change the search strategy, combine words with one of these Boolean or proximity operators:

this operator: retrieves: examples
and all terms somewhere in every record shakespeare and hamlet and women
or any or all terms somewhere in every record women or female
not records containing the first term but not the second civil war not united states
with

all search words somewhere in the same sentence of every record

 encyclopedia with economics
same all search terms somewhere in the same field of every record music same nashville
adj both search words side by side, in the order entered south adj africa
adjn both search words within n words, in the order entered from adj here adj2 eternity
near both search words side by side, in any order style near manual
nearn both search words within n words, in any order causes near5 poverty

Operator precedence

When the search expression consists of a combination of terms, the order in which these terms are searched can be defined. If two operators are at the same level in the list, Acorn first searches the term at the left, then moves right. Refer to the following list for operator precedence, with the highest listed first.

  • near, adj
  • with
  • same
  • and, not
  • or

Nesting

Group or nest search expressions using parentheses. Acorn searches the expression located in the innermost set of parentheses first. Acorn continues the search, moving outward to the terms at the edges of the expression.

Stopwords

These words are excluded from all keyword searches unless enclosed in double quotation marks: a, an, and, as, at, be, but, by, do, for, if, in, is, it, near, not, of, on, or, same, the, to, with.

Select Advanced Search for more keyword search options.