Help on Searching:

Keyword Searching - refers to the ability to search on any word in a particular field. For example in, "The Days of Wine and Roses", the word "roses" is the 6th word. However keyword searches allow a user to search on "roses," and still retrieve this title.

Boolean Operators - And, or, and not, are the Boolean operators supported in this database. If it is necessary to do a string search on one of these words acting not as a Boolean operator, then brackets must be used. For example, "would not want any political change" will allow search using "not" in its lexical sense, rather than in its Boolean function. Please note that "and" is stopworded and cannot be searched in its lexical sense. and - example: "boat and food", will return documents that contain both "boat" and "food". "And" is the default operator. Therefore a search of "dragon boat" will return documents with both "dragon" and "boat". or - example: "dragon or boat", will return documents that contain either or both "dragon" or "boat." not - example: "boat not dragon," will return documents that contain "boat" but not "dragon"

Wildcard Character - The "*" symbol is wildcarded. Therefore a search on "teach*" will return documents with "teach," "teachers," "teaching," etc. A search on "*view" will return documents with "overview," "review," "underview," etc.

Case Insensitivity - is used throughout all the indexes. Therefore searches on "Hong Kong" or "HoNg kOnG" will retrieve the same results.

Stopwords - used in this database are listed below. A search of "I want to be free", would only actually search on "I want be free". It is also not possible to search on puctuation, such as periods, hyphens, ampersands, etc. and, the, of, and to.

Nesting - It is possible to combine several Boolean operators into one search with parentheses. For example, "(elections or electioneering) and (China or Taiwan)."

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