Searching Methods continued

Searching By Author

The most common way to search for an author is by typing in the author's last name followed by a comma then a space and the author's first name. Example: Michaels, Fern. Often, however, people don't remember the author's full name or are unsure of the spelling. Here are some suggestions to fully maximize the capabilities of an Author search. 1. You do not need to enter the full name. You can leave off the author's first name if you are not sure what it might be. Example: Is it Stephen King or Steven King? In this example, you could type in King. The OPAC will generate a list of all books authored by anyone whose last name is "King." For closer matches you could type in King, Ste omitting the last part of the first name. The OPAC would then generate a list of books authored by anyone whose last name is "King" and whose first name begins with "Ste." 2. You can replace part of the name with an asterisk. Example: If you don't know whether an author's last name is spelled Anderson or Andersen, type Anders*n. You cannot enter a last name with an asterisk and a first name. However, you can enter a last name and then a first name with an asterisk. Example: Anderson, Jo*n will find books by Joan Anderson and John Anderson, but not Joy Anderson. 3. Do not type in the author's middle initial (even if you know it). You will (usually) get false search results of 0 titles found. 4. For authors whose first names consist of initials, use the following format: Tolkien, J.R.R. Do not use spaces between the initials, just periods. However, if the first name consists of an initial and then a name, use a space between the initial and the name. Example: Cooper, J. David.

Searching By Subject

If you like to read books about a specific subject, you can conduct a search by subject. Most of the books in our collection have been grouped by subject. The OPAC will provide you with a list of over 600 subjects from which you may choose. Example: Suppose you like to read books by Iowa authors. You can search the OPAC for books categorized under the subject Regional Interest - Iowa Authors. We encourage you to try subject searches to find something new! Here are some tips for searching by subject: 1. There are specific subjects for non-adult readers. Juvenile refers to preschool through middle school readers. Young Adult refers to high school and early college readers. 2. Some subject groupings are very broad. A search may result in thousands of hits. Currently, the only way to narrow the results is to select a specific media. Example: At the time of this writing a search for "Mystery - Other" and "all media" resulted in 5,610 titles. Restricting the search to "Mystery - Other" and "cassettes" resulted in 3,014 titles. 3. Some searches can take a long time to finish. The time it takes for the OPAC to find and display a list of results depends on your search criteria and the speed of your connection to the Internet. You may experience several minutes of delay before your search results appear. The subject groupings that result in the largest number of hits (and will take the longest amount of time to appear) are: