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Brief Introduction to Searching the ISTC
To search the ISTC, you can still enter any number of keywords into the search box. This will search all indexes. To improve the accuracy of your search results, you can enter the terms below into the single search box and combine as many as you like with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT). When combining fields, each field name has to be followed by a colon and the search term without a space, as in the examples below.
| id: | The ISTC number (Marc field 001). |
|---|---|
| author: | The author of a publication (Marc field 100), e.g. author:aesopus. |
| heading: | The uniform heading when a publication has no author (Marc field 130). |
| title: | The title of a publication (Marc field 245). |
| place: | The place of printing or publication as given in the imprint statement (Marc field 260) as well as the modern name form and common variants. For countries, search with a two-letter code from the ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 code list Some frequently used codes are: BE Belgium DE Germany FR France IT Italy GB United Kingdom NL The Netherlands US United States |
| printer: | The printer or publisher as given in the imprint statement (Marc field 260). |
| date: | The year of publication (Marc field 008). |
| language: | The language of a publication (Marc field 008). This is a three-letter code from the Marc Code List for Languages. |
| format: | The bibliographic format (Marc field 300). |
| reference: | The bibliographical reference (Marc field 510). |
| location: | The name of a holding institution and the country where it is located. For countries, this is a two-letter code from the ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 code list Some frequently used codes are: BE Belgium DE Germany FR France IT Italy GB United Kingdom NL The Netherlands US Unite |
| location_count: | The number of institutions which hold a copy of the described edition. |
| shelfmark: | The British Library shelfmark. |
For example:
author:schedel AND title:liber AND date:1493
This will find both the Latin and the German edition of the Liber chronicarum of 1493.
author:aesopus AND language:ita NOT place:rome
This will find the works by Aesop printed in Italian but not printed in Rome.
printer:caxton AND place:westminster NOT location:oxford
This will find works printed by Caxton in Westminster of which no copies are held in libraries in Oxford.
printer:”de worde” OR printer:caxton
This will find books printed by Wynkyn de Worde and books printed by William Caxton.
location_count:3
This will identify the titles which survive in three institutions.
location_count:>3
This will identify the titles which survive in more than three institutions.
place:venice NOT location:it
This will find books printed in Venice which are not held in Italian libraries.
title:(ethica OR poetica)
This will find all books which either have the word ‘ethica’ or the word ‘poetica’ in the title.
You can also search for date ranges, for example: date:[1490 TO 1495] will find all books printed between 1490 and 1495. date:[1490 TO *] will find anything printed from 1490 onwards.
Each set of results is presented in a numbered list, and you can view brief or full displays of all titles on a list. The brief display can be opened and closed by clicking the relevant link (Brief Display or Close Brief Display), and the full display can be accessed by clicking on the heading at the top of a result or the Full Display link at the bottom of an entry on the list.
To get back from the full display to the list of results, please click search in the menu bar.
