Search Tips

Browse Collection:

To browse the online collections, select the Browse Collections button at the top of the page. You can refine your selection by using the facets on the left of the page.

Search Collection:

If you know what you are looking for, you can use the Search box located at the top of the page. The search will recognize keywords in any field describing the item including the title of the item, description of the item, or the full-text of the item when available. You can refine your selection by using the facets on the left of the page.

Other search methods include:

AND, OR, NOT (Boolean) searching:

• Use AND between each keyword of you are looking for materials with multiple keywords. This will narrow your search results to only show materials that contain all of the terms. For example: Osgoode AND fence will only show you results containing both terms. It will not include any material that has only one of the terms.
• Use OR in your search to include results that contain either term. For example: Treasurer OR Bencher will show all results that have either Treasurer or Bencher.
• Using NOT will bring up results that show the first term but not the second. For example: School NOT Toronto will show results that contain the term School but not Toronto.

Quotes:

• Use quotes around a keyword phrase to bring back exact results. For example: “Osgoode Hall” will bring back only results that contain that specific phrase.

Asterisks:

• Use an asterisks at the end of a word to find all variations of that word. For example: law* will bring back results for lawyers, laws, lawsuits, etc.

Parentheses:

• Using parentheses allows you to group together keywords and control the order in which the terms will be searched. For example: (Treasurer OR Bencher) AND Osgoode will bring up searches that contain Osgoode and either Treasurer or Bencher.