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How to Search the ISTC
1. Searching
You may perform a free-text search just by entering a search term into the search box and hitting “search”. Your search will return all the records that contain the given search term in any of their fields.
To get more precise search results, you can combine any number of search terms or even use logical (boolean) operators.
While your search terms could be upper or lower case (or any combination thereof), the logical operators must always be written in capitals.
Truncation and wildcards can be used within and at the end of a search term: an asterisk (*) replaces an arbitrary number of characters, a question mark (?) replaces exactly one character. If you want to search for two or more words that appear next to each other in a specific order (phrase search), enclose your search term in quotation marks (“).
The search engine also supports regular expressions as search terms. The syntax of regular expressions might be a bit complex and difficult to learn, but once mastered, it enables you to formulate rather elaborate queries.
In order to find records where your search term appears only in a certain field, add the field's name to the search term followed by a colon. Please note that there must be no blank before or after the colon. If your search term consists of multiple parts, enclose them by parentheses, e.g. title:(ethica nicomachum)
or title:(ethica OR poetica)
. When searching for phrases, use quotation marks: title:“ethica ad nicomachum”
. In the ISTC the following fields are available for searching:
author: | The author of publication (Marc field 100) |
---|---|
date: | The year of publication (Marc field 008)1) |
format: | The bibliographic format (Marc field 300) |
id: | The ISTC id (Marc field 001) |
heading: | The uniform heading used when the publication has no author (Marc field 130) |
language: | The language of the publication (Marc field 008). This is a 3 letter code from the Marc Code List for Languages |
location: | Name of the holding institution and country where the holding institution is located (2-letter code) |
place: | Place of printing/publication as given in the imprint statement (Marc field 260) as well as the modern name form and common variants |
printer: | Printer/publisher as given in the imprint statement (Marc field 260) |
reference: | Bibliographic reference (Marc field 510) |
shelfmark: | British Library shelfmark |
title: | Title of the publication (Marc field 245) |
2. Customize your Result Display
3. Using Alphabetical Browse Lists
4. Booksmarks and Search History
5. Downloading Records
date:[1480 TO 1490]]
or for books that have been printed before date:<1480
or after date:>1480
a certain year