Searching by Typing a Word

You can find a book or other material by typing a word or words to look for. You can look for a word in a title, a series name, an author's name, a subject, or anywhere in the library catalog. You can also decide if you want to find just fiction (novels and stories), or just non-fiction (such as history, science, or biographies).

Example:
To find the book Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, type Phoenix and click Title. This search works because the word Phoenix is part of the book's title.

Search by typing a word

Follow these steps to search by typing a word or words.

1. Type a word or words in the Look for box.
   • You can type part of a word and an asterisk * to stand for the rest of the word.

Example:
To look for wizards, you can type wiz*

• You can type a question mark ? to stand for exactly one character.

Example:
To look for woman or women, you can type wom?n.

• If you type more than one word, the order does not matter.

Example:
Harry Potter looks for Harry Potter, Potter Harry, Harry, or Potter.

• Some short, common words are skipped in searches, usually words like a, an, and, for, from, in, of, on, the, to, and with. Do not type these words.
• Each word should have more than two characters.

2. Pick a place in the library catalog to look for the word you typed:

Tip:
You can type a word and press ENTER to find materials with your word anywhere in the library catalog.

• Click Anywhere to find materials with your word anywhere in the library catalog.
• Click Subjects to find materials about subjects that include your word.
• Click Titles to find materials with titles that include your word.
• Click Authors to find materials by authors whose names include your word.
• Click Series to find materials in a series, where the series name includes your word.
• Click Fiction to find stories.
• Click NonFiction to find facts.

  The search starts. If the search finds anything, you see the search results list.

  If the search does not find anything, you see a page with search help.

3. To clear your search results and go back to the home page, click the picture at the top of the page.

Related Information

• Tips - See "Searching Tips" for some suggestions about searching.
• Get more information about a title - See "Looking at Search Results".
• Ask the library to hold a title for you - See "Getting a Title From the Library".