Keyword searching--Watch this tutorial from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. If your search term is a phrase, e.g., organized crime, enclose the phrase in quotation marks. "Organized crime" is a more specific search than typing the words separately.
Boolean operators (AND, OR, AND NOT) These words are used to combine your search terms. Click here to see a tutorial in the Gingrich Guide.
Truncation--Use the asterisk * to retrieve all variants of a word. For example, educat* will retrieve education, educating, educator. But be careful! Con* will retrieve convict, contract, constitution and all other words that start that way. You will get many irrelevant items.
Field--A field is the location in the record where your terms are located, e.g., title, subject, author.
