Types of search

If two or more terms are entered on the same line in a field, the Boolean operator AND applies:

In this example, records containing both words rock and roll anywhere, and in any order, in the Notes field will be found.

Tip: You are not limited to two search terms in an AND search, i.e. you could enter rock roll music and all three terms would need to be present in the Notes field.

If two or more terms are entered on different lines in a field, the Boolean operator OR applies:

A record will be returned as long as it contains at least one of the words, rock or roll in this example.

Tip: You are not limited to two search terms in an OR search; simply add a search term to another row.

NOT is specified by placing an exclamation mark ! before a search term. The NOT operator excludes records that have the following term in the search field.

NOT search	Description
\!rock	Records that contain the word rock in the search field will not be returned by this search.
\!rock roll	This search will return records that contain roll in the search field but only if rock does not also appear in the field: Records with sausage roll in the search field will be returned; records with rock and roll in the search field will not be returned.

The NOT operator can be applied to any of the other search operators.

NOT and NULL (an empty field)

It is important to be aware that a NOT search will not return a record where the search field is empty (has no value), even though logically an empty field does not contain the excluded term:

A phrase is one or more words adjacent to each other, e.g. business systems. In a Phrase search, quotation marks are used to define the phrase.

A Phrase search returns records that contain the search terms in the order in which they appear between the quotation marks:

Phrase	Search results
\"business systems\"	Records with the phrase business systems will be returned. A Phrase search is more precise than a Boolean AND search in which the words can appear anywhere and in any order in the search field. For example, an AND search for business systems would return a record containing the sentence "The business has many systems". Our example Phrase search would not return this record.
\"sacre-coeur\"	A phrase search is not case or diacritics sensitive. For instance, in the first example, records with business systems, Business systems or Business Systems will be returned. And in this example, records containing the phrase Sacré-Cœur would be returned. Tip: See Case Sensitivity & Diacritics below for details about making a Phrase search case sensitive.

With stemming it is possible to find records that contain variations / derivatives of a search term (e.g. plural, adjectival, conjugation, etc.).

Stemming is specified by placing a ~ (tilde) directly before the search term:

Stemming	Search results
\~system	system, systems, systematic, systematics, systemless, systematically, systematise, systemic, systemise
\~view	view, viewer, viewing, viewable, viewership, viewfinder, viewgraph, viewless, viewpoint
\~bracket	bracket, bracketed, bracketing

A Phonetic search returns records that contain terms that sound like the search term. A Phonetic search uses the @ symbol:

Phonetic	Search results
\@krystal	crystal, krystal
\@color	colour, color
\@smith	smith, smyth, smythe

Text searches are not case sensitive by default. A search for business will return records with the word business or Business, for instance. To make a text search case sensitive, use an equals sign = before the search term:

Case Sensitive	Search results
\=Business	This search will return records which contain Business but not business.
\=\"Business system\"	This search combines a case sensitive search with a phrase search and will return Business system but not business system.

As text searches are case insensitive by default, there is rarely a need to specify that a search is case insensitive. A situation in which it would be useful is where we specify a case sensitive Phrase search but want a word in the phrase to be case insensitive. We use \& to specify case insensitivity:

Case Insensitive	Search results
\=\"This is about our Business \&Systems\"	This search would locate both This is about our Business Systems and This is about our Business systems.

Tip: Alphanumeric data is handled a little differently to numeric data (date fields can take alphanumeric data; and values in latitude and longitude fields are by their nature alphanumeric, i.e. 51 39 00 N). Whenever you use alphanumeric data in a range search, the value must be enclosed in double quotes (e.g.\"51 39 00 N\" or \"1 January 1970\").

Tip: It is not necessary to escape relational operators (>, >=, <, <=).

Tip: It is not necessary to use an equals sign (=) to find a specific date or number.

Tip: It is possible to specify an upper and lower limit by combining range search terms. For example >=30 <=50 will find all records from 30 to 50 inclusive.

When performing a partial range search, it is important to avoid use of = with the relational operators (< or >).

Consider this query using a partial date:

AdmDateModified >= 2012

There are effectively two requests here:

1. Locate records with a date that is greater than 2012.
2. Locate records that equal 2012.

The first search will return all records where AdmDateModified is from 1 January 2013, which is as expected.

However, the second part will always return no matches. A date recorded in EMu comprises three parts (day/month/year), but some parts of the date in our search term are not unknown - in this case the day and month are technically NULL (although it might be easier to understand NULL as UNKNOWN). What we intend by our search is that any record with a year of 2012 is returned, but when we use the equals modifier (=) we're actually requesting that the date recorded in AdmDateModified exactly matches NULL/NULL/2012 (or UNKNOWN/UNKNOWN/2012). This will of course match nothing.

A reliable method for capturing all records within a year where day and / or month may be missing is simply to search by year. For instance, to find all records created in 2019 or later, you could search for:

AdmDateModified >2018

This will return all records from 1 January 2019 onwards.

Latitude / Longitude

A similar issue arises with partial DMS latitude and longitude values.

Consider this query using a partial latitude:

LatLatitude_nesttab >=\"34 30 S\"

There are effectively two requests here:

1. Locate records where latitude is greater than 34 30 S.
2. Locate records where latitude equals 34 30 S.

The first search will return all records with a latitude north of 34 30 S.

However the second part will in fact always return no matches. As with dates, the reason is that you cannot have a partial latitude EQUAL anything as some parts of the DMS latitude are unknown (in this case seconds is NULL).

Again, the solution is to avoid using <= and >= with partial ranges. The query:

LatLatitude_nesttab >\"34 31 S\"

would return records with a latitude equal to or north of 34 30 S.

You want to find Bibliographic records about the ethics of cloning. You type clon\* and ethic\* in the Notes field and run a search. The following record is one of the matches:

Even though the two terms do display in the same record, the terms appear quite far apart, and while the record does discuss cloning and does mention ethics, it is not about the ethics of cloning.

To further refine the search, you now run a proximity search. This search specifies that two terms must display within five words of each other:

\'\(clon\* ethic\*\) <= 5 words\'

This time the above record is not found because the search terms are too far apart. However, this search does find the following record because the two terms display within five words of each other. The probability that this record is on the subject of ethics and cloning is much higher, and indeed this is correct: