Search Tips.
Tip of the Month for June: You can set or change your Personal Preferences by clicking on the ‘My Preferences’ link on the left of the front page. This will take you to ‘Set User Preferences’ where you can select your default search page features, including the number of results per page. (The bottom box, above ‘Jaws Enhanced’ and ‘Update Preferences’.) You can increase the results from ten to one hundred if so desired. Also included are format, language and reading level.
Tip of the Month for May: After logging into Visway, choose “show your selections” and the “cancel” next to the book in question. Next, type the title into the search query box, select the title required and “have this title sent to you as a priority”. You can make up to 6 priority title reservations.
Tip of the Month for April: Do you want to place a request or reservation on a book using the catalogue number? Just type the letter ‘R’ in the Basic Search or Keyword search box, then add zeroes before the catalogue number so that there are 10 numbers total. For example, if you wanted to look up “58 Short Stories” by O. Henry, you would type 4 zeroes in front to make it R0000103218. If the AU number was only 5 digits long, you would put 5 zeroes in front of the number, to make it up to 10 digits.
Tip of the Month for March: Unsure of how to spell an author's surname? Use an asterix after the first few letters to truncate the name and make searching easier. For example: Court* in the Author box in Advanced Search will return results for Bryce Courtenay, Margaret Court and Brendie Courtie.
Tip of the Month for February: If the ‘My Preferences’ page is used to update your search preferences, the Filter box of your chosen limiter will move from the ‘Advanced Search’ page to the default Search page (seen when using the ‘Basic Search’ or ‘Welcome to Visway’ pages). This preference will remain on this page (until/unless it is reset in the ‘My Preferences’ page).
Tip of the Month for January: To narrow down a New Books search by Format, use the Advanced Search option and type NB plus the first three letters of the previous month (for example NBDEC) in the Keyword box, then select the appropriate Format from the dropdown box.
Tip of the Month for December: For JAWS users - Press 1 to skip links at the top of the page.
The simplest way to search the library catalogue is to enter one or more words that you wish each record searched for to contain. Separate each word with a space. Only those records containing each word you enter will be displayed. For example, entering the word War followed by the word Peace will show all records containing the word War and the word Peace.
The same result can be obtained by using the Boolean operator AND between each record. Boolean operators are words such as AND, OR, and NOT that are used to combine search terms, to broaden or narrow the results of a search. The default Boolean operator for the catalogue is AND, which means if your keywords are separated by a space, AND is automatically used.
If you wish the records to contain any of the words you enter, separate the words with the Boolean operator OR. For example War OR Peace will display all records that contain the word War as well as all records that contain the word Peace.
If you wish to search for a part of a word, use an asterisk to denote the part of the word that has not been entered. For example entering Aust* will return records containing words starting with Aust.
If you wish to exclude a word or phrase from your search, use the Boolean operator NOT. For example, War NOT Peace will return records contain the word War provided they do not contain the word Peace.
If you wish to search for a particular phrase, include it in double quotes. For example, entering "War and Peace" will return only those records that contain the phrase War and Peace. When enclosed anywhere in double quotes, the Boolean operator is treated as a regular word, and not a Boolean operator.
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