Searching the Library Catalog (Primo)

To search for a phrase, type quotation marks around the phrase. 

If you do not enclose the phrase in quotation marks, the system will find items that contain the individual words in the phrase, regardless of if these words are located next to each other in the order specified. 

For example, to search for grey wolves as one term, type "grey wolves" into the search panel:

In the first search result, the words grey wolves are located next to each other in a phrase and are underlined in yellow, showing that the search query pulled the item due to the phrase "grey wolves."

You can search for items that contain either of the words or phrases you type in the search box using the Boolean operator OR.

Using the operator OR is a great way to expand your search and can be useful when searching for a concept that is referred to in multiple ways, like television OR TV. They mean the same thing, but by not searching for both terms, you could miss relevant items. 

In the above search results for television OR TV, we get results that contain one term or the other, or both terms. This results in a very broad search with a large number of results. 

You can exclude items that contain specific words or phrases. To do so, you will type the Boolean operator NOT before the words or phrase you want to exclude. 

For example, if you are doing research on social media, but don't want information on Facebook, you could type "social media" NOT Facebook, to exclude items that have Facebook in their title or item record. 

Searching with wildcard characters

You can include the following wildcard characters in your searches:

• ?—enter a question mark to perform a single character wildcard search. For example, typing wom?n to search for records will include variations of the word like woman, women, and so forth in the search results. 
• *—enter an asterisk to perform a multiple character wildcard search. For example, type cultur* to search for record that will include variations of the word like culture, cultural, and culturally. 

However, the system ignores wildcard characters placed at the beginning of terms. For example, the system treats the search terms ?aying and *aying as if you had searched for the term aying. 

Grouping terms within a query/search string

You can use parenthesis to group terms within a query. For example, to search for information on Shakespeare's tragedies or sonnets, you could type: Shakespeare (traged* OR sonnet) in the search bar. 

The parenthesis work similarly to how they do in math, so in this case the search results will contain the terms Shakespeare and either tragedy/ies or sonnet. 

To get to the advanced search bar you will want to click on the advanced search button to the right hand side of the main search bar.

The advanced search panel allows you to add multiple filters and parameters to the search

1. Search scope: set the search scope to Great Falls MSU, Great Falls MSU Print Collection, or TRAILS Collections
   • Great Falls College MSU: searches all materials (print and electronic) available at Weaver Library
   • Great Falls College MSU Print Collection: searches all print/physical materials (books, dvds, journals) available at Weaver Library.
   • TRAILS Collections: searches materials available to request/borrow from Treasure State Academic Information & Library Services member institutions. 
2. Any field:  this drop down lets you limit the search by the field type. This can be by author name, title, subject. If you leave this at "any field" it will search all fields for the text you enter in step 4.
3. contains: this drop down lets you select whether or not the terms in the search results are a partial or exact match to the terms you enter in step 4.
   • contains: results will contain the text entered, but do not have to be an exact match. 
   • is (exact): results will contain the text exactly as entered, with no missing or added terms. 
   • starts with: results will start with the terms entered. This works well when you know the beginning of a book or article title, but not the whole title. 
4. Enter a search term: this is where you will enter a single search term or a search phrase.
5. AND (Boolean operator): this fields lets you choose Boolean operators to link your search lines together.
   • AND: links two terms together and narrows the amount of results. Search results will contain both terms.
   • OR: tells the search engine that both terms are interchangeable. Using OR will broaden search results and will yield results that contain either term. 
   • NOT: tells the search engine that you do not want results containing the term following the operator NOT (example: infants NOT children). This narrows results and yields results containing only the first term in the search string. 
6. Material type: narrow your results by adding a material type filter. You can filter results by the following material types: books, electronic books, articles, journals, images, audio visual, and all items. 
7. Language: filter your results by language (language the materials are written in). 
8. Publication date: filter your results by publication date range (last year, last two years, last 5 years, last 10 years, etc.).
9. Add a new line: each new line will contain the elements from steps 2 through 4, and will be linked to the other lines by a Boolean operator.