Searching the BiblioCommons catalogue

Searching for items in our BiblioCommons catalogue is dead simple: just put in the name of the author, or title of the item, or subject, or any combination of keywords you are looking for into the search box at the top of the page and hit the red search button.

Unlike our previous catalogue BiblioCommons does fuzzy searching, a bit like Google: it can make good guesses about what you are trying to find, even if you misspell the word.

In the above searches 'Whykickamoocow' results in two items whereas 'Why kick a moo cow' has no results but the catalogue responds:

Advanced Search

Still not getting the results you want? Why not try Advanced Search. Advanced Search offers further searching options such as boolean keyword searching and the ability to limit keyword searches to a specific field or fields of catalogue records.

Too many results?

With a simple keyword search it is very likely that you might get rather more results than you want. For example, a search on 'trains' results in nearly 2000 records including fiction and children’s works, DVDs, audiobooks and other formats.

Narrow your results

You can easily refine these results by filtering them using the options on the left of the results list.

This filter allows you to narrow results by availability (e.g. libraries), format (book, DVD, magazine etc), audience (adult, child, teen), or when the item was acquired. By narrowing to adult books at Hornby Library my list of nearly 2000 is reduced to only 26.

There are many more filters in the left hand sidebar, depending on the contents of your results. The By content filter allows you to specify, for instance, just the non-fiction items, narrowing the results to 776.

Un-narrowing your results

As you add filters to your results they will be displayed at the top of the left hand sidebar as seen here. By clicking the red X buttons you can turn each filter off individually.