Limiting and Sorting a Catalog Search

Many times you will conduct a search in the library catalog and retrieve a large number of items. For example, an author search for "Faulkner, William 1897 1962" retrieves nearly 1,500 hits. When you retrieve a large result list, you will want to narrow your search in some way in order to reduce the number of hits to a more manageable number. To limit the results of a search in the catalog, click on the Limit/Sort Search button which is found at the top and bottom of the screen listing the records from your search. This will take you to the limit screen.

You can limit a set of records in the following ways:

• YEAR of publication: You may restrict your set of records to those published after a particular year or before another year. This allows you, for example, to remove older, potentially dated items from your list.
• MATERIAL type: This option lets you restrict the items in your list to those in a particular format, including books, periodicals, music scores, videos/films, and audio cd.
• LANGUAGE: You may narrow your results to a single language. That way you may be sure that all the items you have are in English, or whichever language you specify.
• PUBLISHER: Extract those items from your records published by a specific company or organization.
• WHERE Item is located: With this option you may limit your record list to items available on the internet (such as ebooks), found in the Science Library, or found in various locations inside the main library (such as Special Collections or Main-Reference).
• Words in TITLE, AUTHOR, or SUBJECT: Adding more words to the search will restrict it still further.
• Sort results by year: Clicking the small box to the left of this phrase will display your list of records in reverse order of publication, showing the most recently published items first. This is another way of quickly identifying newer material.

When you have filled in as much information as you wish, click on Limit/sort items retrieved using above data button located below the form. The catalog will return to your result list, modified according to the criteria you selected. This may take some time, depending on how many records were in your original set. The more records the computer has to sort through, the longer it will take.

If the applied limits remove all the results from the list, you will stay at the limit screen, which will display the message "No items found matching specified limit." Different criteria can then be selected, and a new limit search tried.

Click on the following links for examples of how to limit the search "Faulkner, William 1897 1962."

• Example 1 -- Limit by material type= video/film, words in title= dust
• Example 2 -- Limit by material type= books, years= 1960-1970, language= Russian
• Example 3 -- Limit by material type= books, years= 2000-, language= English, publisher= Random House
• Example 4 -- Limit by location= Special Collections, words in subject= exhibitions

What is the difference between limiting a search and modifying a search?

Both of these options allow you to narrow your search further. As seen above, the option to limit is given when a specific field is searched for, such as title or author.

When you do a keyword search, you are given the option to modify it. Clicking on the Modify Search button will bring you to the Advanced Keyword Search screen, where you can enter additional information.