Jean and Alexander Heard Library--ACORN Help

Help with Acorn
More on keyword searching

Keyword searches may be entered on either the Quick Search or Complex Search pages.

The Complex Search page offers a guided keyword search form, including options for limiting searches by publication year, language, library, etc. and for sorting results.

Precise Phrase Searching

Designate a set of terms as a single 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, Acorn limits the number of characters matched.

To literally search these symbols/characters, enclose them with 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 (use carefully)	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