LibAnswers
How do I search for books, articles, etc?
Answer
Te Waharoa is the Library's catalogue and discovery service, from here you can search for physical items held in our libraries and our vast online collections.
Searching is easy. Just type one or more words into the search box then press enter, you'll find the search box located at the top of the page you can also search.
Searching for a Phrase
To search for a phrase, type quotation marks around the words. This will find the exact words you have typed in your search, in that order.
| "global warming" |
Searching for alternative words (synonyms)
You can search for items that contain at least one of the words or phrases you have typed in the search box. This is useful when searching for synonyms. To do this, type OR (in CAPS) between the words or phrases.
| teenager OR adolescent OR youth |
Excluding Words or Phrases
You can exclude items that contain specific words or phrases. To do this, type NOT (in CAPS) and then type the word or phrase that you would like to exclude.
| irish NOT celtic |
Searching for different word endings
Enter an asterisk (*) to retrieve different word endings based on the word stem. This is useful for retrieving both singular and plural forms of words. For example, type cultur* to search for records that contain words that begin with the stem cultur, such as culture, cultural, and culturally.
| cultur* |
Searching for different spellings of a word
Enter a question mark (?) to replace any single character within a word. For example, type wom?n to search for woman OR women.
| wom?n |
Grouping keywords
You can use brackets to group keywords. For example, to search for Shakespeare and either tragedy or sonnet, type the following in the search box. Note: AND searching is automatic.
| shakespeare(tragedy OR sonnet) |
The above search is the same as Shakespeare AND (tragedy OR sonnet).
Advanced Search
Advanced Search allows you to search using a phrase or a combination of words appearing in specific fields such as the title or author field. You can also limit your results to Resource Type, Language or Publication Date.
Saving a search
To save a search, Click on the Save query button at the top of the results screen
