« Help Topics

Tips: "Notes/Table of Contents keyword" searches

Use the Notes/Table of Contents keyword search as a supplement to Title keyword searching. It covers various kinds of decriptive notes about a book, including the titles of individual chapters or material in collections such as essays, poems, or plays.

Only some books in the library are indexed this way. If you do not get enough results, remember that the kinds of material found through Table of Contents searching are often published as journal articles. Try searching article databases or ask a librarian for help.

Example
You want to find material on Latino/Latina cultural identity.

1. In the search box, type:   latin* identity
2. Click on Notes/Table of Contents keyword(s)
3. Click on the Search button.

Pathfinder retrieves all items in the catalog that have the words latin, latino or latina and the word identity anywhere in the Notes (which includes table of contents data for some books).

Wildcard searching

As shown in the example above, to find multiple forms of a word, type at least three letters, then an asterisk  *  immediately after the last letter. Pathfinder reads the  *  as a wildcard truncation symbol, and will search for words that begin with the letters you type. For more options, see Truncation and Plurals.

For more precise results

Because a table of contents can contain many different titles, you may get more precise results by specifying that your search words need to be close together. Do this by typing the letter n (for "near") and a number.

Example:
In the search box, type:   latin* n5 identity
Pathfinder retrieves items with these words closer than 5 words apart in the notes/table of contents.

You can use any number between 1 and 25. This technique will work in any Pathfinder keyword search, but it is especially useful here. For more information, see Order and Closeness (proximity).

« Help Topics