Searching

In OAIster, we offer boolean searching and results display, with simple searching a part of our improvement plans. When you find a record in OAIster, you will be able to click on a link to access the digital resource.

Enter words or phrases in the boxes in "Search within fields." Two or more words entered in one box are assumed to be a phrase. No quotations are necessary.

You can choose different fields to search within from the drop-down menu:

• Entire Record: This will look in every field in the available records.
• Title: This will look for titles of books, articles, journals, audio files, etc., in the title field of the available records.
• Author/Creator: This will look for authors of books, creators of paintings, institutions responsible for a pamphlet, etc., in the author/creator field of the available records. It will also look for contributors.
• Subject: This will look for words or phrases that have been used to describe the topical nature of a digital resource. These are subjects used by the resource publisher to classify the resource.

You can enter more than one word or phrase to view records that contain all the words you entered (choose "and") or any of the words you entered (choose "or") or to exclude words you don't want to appear in the records (choose "not").

You can also limit by resource type, i.e., text, image, audio, video or dataset. You have the option to choose more than one resource type. To see what kinds of resource types you are searching when choosing one of these options, see our normalization value list.

Searching Tips

• Words and Phrases: If you enter more than one word in a search box, the words will be treated as a phrase and searched together, e.g., entering fancy dress in "Search all fields" will find records that have the word fancy next to dress. No quotations are necessary.
• Inverted Author Names: Authors may be in inverted order, so if you don't find appropriate resources using one method, e.g., emily dickinson, try it inverted, e.g., dickinson emily.
• Word Variations: Use an asterisk with a word stem to find variations on the word, e.g., searching for civ* will match civ, civil, civic, civilization, and civilian.
• Punctuation: All other punctuation will be ignored, e.g., searching for gone? will retrieve records containing both gone? and gone.
• Capitalization: Capitalization is ignored, e.g., Pragmatism and pragmatism are searched the same way.

Sorting

You can also choose how you want to sort your search results -- by title, author/creator, date descending, date ascending, hit frequency and weighted hit frequency.

• Both title and author/creator order your results from A-Z.
• Date descending orders your results from newest to oldest, e.g., from 2001 to 1979.
• Date ascending orders your results from oldest to newest, e.g., from 1979 to 2001.
• Hit frequency counts the number of instances the words and phrases you entered were found in records, and orders them from highest count to lowest count.
• Weighted hit frequency does what hit frequency does but gives more weight to instances of words and phrases in certain fields. The records will display a score if weighted hit frequency is chosen, based on the algorithm we use.

For result lists over 1000, we cannot provide sorting options. The default sort order is by title.

Search Results

There is a search summary box at the top of your search results page which repeats the word(s) you used in your search, indicates which field(s) you chose to search in, and tells you how many records you found. From this summary, you can click on the "Revise your search" link, which takes you back to your original search.

Each record can include all or some of the following fields. Search results will return all of the fields present for a particular record; not every field is present for every record.

• Title: The title of a book, an article, a journal, an audio file, etc. (Sometimes titles look like authors, which is an artifact of cataloging the resource.)
• Author/Creator: The author of a book, creator of a painting, institution responsible for a pamphlet, etc.
• Contributor: An additional author, creator, institution, etc. Contributors can be editors, illustrators, research assistants, etc.
• Publisher: Who published the resource as a digital resource or originally published the resource, e.g., "Engineering Research Institute, University of Michigan."
• Year: The year the resource was published as a digital resource or originally published.
• Resource Type: The type of resource, e.g., "text," "image." This field often indicates more specific descriptions of type, such as "report" or "photograph."
• Resource Format: The particular format of a resource type, e.g., if the resource type is "text," the resource format may be "HTML."
• Language: The language(s) the resource was originally written or spoken in. Often these languages are in code. You can check this resource to decipher any three-letter codes you find.
• Source: Where the resource was originally published or made available.
• Note: Any information that doesn't fit into other fields is generally placed in a note. This field may provide information on table of contents, history and related information.
• Subject: The words or phrases that have been used to describe the topical nature of a resource by a resource publisher.
• URL: The link that takes you to the resource itself.
• Rights: The access and copyright information for the resource, as determined by the institution that manages the collection.
• Data Contributor: The record is managed by a data contributor. View a list of the contributors of data we harvest.