Recherche Avancée en Bibliothèque

ET, OU et NON sont les éléments de base de la recherche dans une bibliothèque, mais avec quelques symboles supplémentaires et une compréhension de la syntaxe des opérateurs, vous pouvez affiner vos recherches pour tirer le meilleur parti de la bibliothèque.

Après les trois opérateurs de base, les guillemets sont la fonctionnalité la plus utile de la syntaxe de recherche de bibliothèque. Rappelez-vous comment la recherche théologie du processus signifie vraiment processus ET théologie dans le langage du système ? Les guillemets indiqueront au système de lire “théologie du process” maintenant, au lieu de trouver tous les enregistrements qui contiennent ces deux mots quelque part, il ne trouvera que les enregistrements où ces mots apparaissent ensemble dans cette configuration exacte. Cela peut être utile si vous recherchez un terme technique très spécifique composé de mots plus génériques (comme, en effet, la théologie du processus), ou vous pouvez l'utiliser pour rechercher des œuvres spécifiques par leur titre. Dans le Noël Pas Le Père Noël exemple ci-dessus, vous pourriez utiliser des guillemets pour rechercher Noël PAS “ Père Noël ” si c'était important d'indiquer le nom complet.

Les astérisques (cette petite étoile que vous pouvez utiliser en appuyant simultanément sur les touches Maj et 8 sur un clavier standard en langue anglaise) sont très utiles pour rechercher des sujets où un mot racine peut être accompagné de plusieurs terminaisons possibles.

Au lieu de faire des recherches séparées pour les mots théologie, théologique, théologiser, et theologian to make sure you get everything you need, you can simply search for theolog*, and the system will search for the typed letters with any ending. As you can imagine, this is more useful with some roots than with others. For most people, the example of theolog* is probably actually much too broad. Similarly, the search Christ* will get you results with Christ, Christian, Christianity, and Christmas, as well as Christopher, Christchurch, christendom, Christina, christen, and on and on. Make sure to type as much of the word as you possibly can without excluding the endings you want to see (theolog* instead of theo* or, worse, the*). With a few exceptions, roots less than four or five letters probably won’t be helpful.

Asterisks are most useful where you don’t want to differentiate between singular and plural, or where a root might have equally relevant forms in different parts of speech (a noun, verb, adjective, etc., such as Jew et Jewish ou oblige et obligation). Adding another operator can help limit the search if there are too many results. For example, the endless possibilities of the term christ* might be narrowed down a very little bit with christ* AND england ou christ* AND scripture.

Parentheses enable you to combine multiple operators and determine the order in which they’re read. The system will perform the segment of the string inside in the innermost parentheses first, and then will use the results of that operation to perform the next one.

If you type the phrase with different operators, the system will read the AND operation first. In the string pastor AND Methodist OR Presbyterian, the system will give you all the results that combine the words pastor et Methodist, plus all the results with Presbyterian, whether or not the word pastor is present. If you put AND pastor on the other side of Presbyterian it will still read the AND first. You’d get a lot of things about Presbyterian pastors plus a lot of things about Methodists. 

But that probably isn’t what you meant. Instead, use the string pastor AND (Methodist OR Presbyterian). The system will first find all of the records containing either of the words Methodist et Presbyterian, then will narrow the results by selecting the records that also contain the word pastor. You can create even more steps by nesting the parentheses: education AND (pastor AND (Methodist OR Presbyterian)) might be a roundabout way to look for research on denominational seminaries. Make sure to count your parentheses and close all of your phrases.

You can also use parentheses to search for terms that have important synonyms, and you can use multiple separate parenthetical phrases in the same string, like (bible OR scripture) AND (Hebrew OR Jewish).

• Tip: You can create strings as long and as nested as you want, although if your searches are getting very complicated there’s probably an easier way. Try finding different search terms, such as seminary AND (Methodist OR Presbyterian) ou seminar* AND denomination* instead of education AND (pastor AND (Methodist OR Presbyterian)) or, if you’re getting very, very specific, head to Google to find the title of the individual book you’re looking for.
• Tip: You don’t need parentheses if you’re using the same operator throughout your string or if you have only one operator. Methodist AND Presbyterian AND Baptist is the same as if you put parentheses anywhere in that string. You only need parentheses when you’re mixing AND, OR, and NOT.
• Tip: It doesn’t matter what order you put things in if you’re using parentheses correctly. (Methodist OR Presbyterian) AND pastor should find the same results as the example above. You could also switch the order of Methodist et Presbyterian.

To increase efficiency, the system will ignore some words, called stop words. Inclusion of these words as part of the search string would return most or even literally all of the records available.

The most common stop words are:

• articles (a, an, the)
• most small prepositions (in, out, of, by, to, on, etc.)
• the verb be and many of its conjugations (are, is, etc.)
• subordinating conjunctions (if, which, that, etc.)

Sometimes it’s easier to type what’s in your head or what you’re used to typing, rather than take the time to sort through all of the things that are irrelevant, even if the parsed version is simpler. The searches bible et the Bible will get you the same results, so there’s no harm in including stop words or capital letters if it would take more effort to stop yourself from typing them. The important thing to remember is that the system doesn’t understand normal English, so including stop words won’t improve your results. The phrase law in the bible is identical, as far as the system is concerned, to law AND bible. If you want to distinguish Deuteronomistic legal codes from modern laws about or based on the Bible, you need to construct a search using distinct terms, such as torah ou “deuteronomistic code”.

Of course, stop words and the operators AND, OR, and NOT are normal words that often appear in titles. If you’re looking for a specific work, this is easy to get around in two ways: 

• You can choose distinctive words from the title, such as god graffiti ou finding god graffiti (including the author’s name for good measure, if you want).
• You can use quotation marks, as in “finding god in the graffiti”.

If the title doesn’t contain any especially distinctive words and you need to include a stop word or an operator word to find it (for example, the book Jesus Christ is not God), quotation marks are the best solution.

Tip: It is very difficult to find full lists of stop words. The ones listed above are safe to assume, but longer prepositions like above, through, or along may or may not be excluded from your searches. Trial and error is a good strategy, and when in doubt, quotation marks will always make sure those words are included. You can even put quotation marks around a single word.

An easy and usually reliable way to search for a resource you already know about is to search for the author’s name plus two or three major words from the title. Above, we tried the example graffiti de rogers dieu. This works nearly all the time, if the title and the author’s name are distinct enough.

But what if they aren’t distinct (a frequent problem in biblical studies, where it’s common to find dozens of books with titles like The Gospel of Matthew ou Deuteronomy)? Or what if you remember the book’s title, but without the author’s name you aren’t getting the correct results? Or what if you simply want to see all of the available works by a specific author?

Enter the index identifiers. All of the searches so far in this guide have been keyword searches, which means that they do not specify a particular part of the record to search, and therefore search the entire record. But catalog records are divided into distinct sections. These are explained a little more fully in the section of this guide called Technical Stuff, but for now you just need to know that they exist and you can specify them in your searches.

The most common index identifiers are:

• au = author (In the DTL this will also find editors, translators, other creators and sometimes contributors.)
• ti = title
• su = subject (This searches specific sections of the catalog record, and will not necessarily find all items that could be considered to belong to that subject. See the Technical Stuff section for more.)

To use these identifiers, type them with a colon (:) or equal sign (=) before the search term. You can also use them with other operators, quotation marks, and parentheses, and all of the usual rules apply. Here are a few different ways to find Dr. Rogers’s book:

• ti: “finding god in the graffiti”
• au: Frank Rogers
• au: “Frank Rogers”
• graffiti AND au: rogers

You can also search for an author’s works by finding one of them through a keyword or title search and then clicking on the author’s name where it appears as a link in the record.

• Tip: Although it appears in one of the examples, it’s usually best not to search for an author’s name in quotation marks. This is because not all authors are identified in the system by simply their first and last name. Many authors use initials, shortened names, or middle names, which don’t always appear in the same ways on all of their publications. Some people, often women, may have published under two or three names at different times in their careers, and some authors with Asian or African names adopt Western names that may appear differently in different publications. Librarians have ways of collecting all of these names under a single author record, but the record name might not be the one you’re expecting. Quotation marks may be helpful to distinguish two authors with similar names, but only if you’re sure of the record name.