When using a  "Title begins with..." search, omit a, an or the, when they appear at the beginning of a title. For example, to search for the catcher in the rye, enter the search as catcher in the rye in the "Enter Search Term " box.  

When using an "Author begins with..." search, always enter the last name followed by the first name.  With an author keyword search word order is not important.

A "begins with..." search always assumes right truncation. The search is a character by character match, starting on the left.

In a keyword search, you can use quote marks to perform a phrase search.  That is,  "computer programming" will give you only records that have the word computer NEXT to the word programming.

Lower-case letters will find matches of capitalized words also. For example, computer will find matches for computer, Computer and COMPUTER.

Use the ? character to find matches that contain portions of words. For example, gun? will retrieve gun, guns, gunners, gunnery, gunning, etc. In another example, ?ology will retrieve anthropology, archaeology, psychology, etc. The ? character may also be used to find variant spellings. For example, alumi?m will find both the American spelling, aluminum, and the British spelling, aluminium.

The * character will perform the same function as the ?.