To search for books currently available on your ebrary site, go to your usual ebrary site then:
To list all titles:
- Leave the simple search box empty
- Click the “Search” button
To search Text and Key Fields for a word or multiple words:
- Type them in the simple search box
- Click the “Search” button
To search on specific criteria:
- Click “Advanced” next to the “Search” button
- To the right of “Search in” use the drop-down menu to set the field to search in, for example:
Title refers to the exact words in the title (ebrary searching is literal,
if the title is “Dogs” and you search for “Dog” it won’t be a match)
Doc ID is the unique ID number that ebrary assigns to each book (it is always shown as part of the URL to a specific ebrary book)
Publication year is the publishing date for the particular ebook version ebrary offers (often different from the original print publication date)
LC Call Number is the official Library of Congress number for a particular subject area. The following link gives the basics of LC Call number ranges: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco
- In the field to the right of “for“, fill in the specific data to search for
For advanced options, see:
http://support.ebrary.com/kb/searching-using-or-not-and/
http://support.ebrary.com/kb/proximity-search/
- To add additional search lines, click the “+” button
- To remove search lines, click the “-” button
- Once your search is set, click the “Search” button below the search criteria
To sort search results by Relevance, Title, Contributor (first author), Publisher, or Date, click the links at the right
To display Short, Medium, or Long view of data about the books in your search results, click the links at the right
Important note about ebrary’s current search engine:
Searches are exact searches on entire words – no partial-word searching:
- Searching for dog will not find dogs
Want to be alerted if new titles on your ebrary site match certain criteria? Or if a particular title is offered for purchase in the future? Simply follow the steps below to create the corresponding search.
To create a saved search:
1. Go to your ebrary site and sign in to your personal ebrary account
2. Create and run a new search as follows:
a. Click on “Advanced” next to the Simple Search window
b. Set up your desired search criteria
To search for titles in a subscription collection you don’t have, see the Advanced Search Instructions below
Admins, to search for new purchasable content, add a search line and set “Collection” to “All Purchasable”. This will search ebrary titles available for purchase; results returned will point to preview-only copies
c. Click “Search” (you need to do this for the search to be save-able)
3. Find and save your search as follows:
a. Under the Search tab, then under the SEARCHES tab, look for the search you just ran and click “Save” for that search
b. This will bring up a new window in which you can set search name, email address, search frequency (setting frequency to 0 turns off alerts)
c. Click “Create”
To modify your saved search criteria or search frequency:
1. Go to your ebrary site and sign in to your personal ebrary account
2. Under the Search tab, then under the SEARCHES tab, look for your saved search
3. Click on “Edit” for that search
4. Here you can change search name, email address, search frequency (setting frequency to 0 turns off alerts!!)
a. If you make changes here, click “Update” (takes you back to SEARCHES tab)
5. Or, to change the search criteria, click on “Edit Search Criteria”
a. Make any desired changes to your search criteria
b. Click “Search” (you need to do this for the search to be save-able)
c. Click “Update Search”
Advanced Search Instructions
You can search for titles in a subscription collection you don’t have; results returned will point to preview-only copies.
1. Go to the alltitles preview site at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles
2. Do an advanced search and include the collection to search (for example Academic Complete) and the criteria (for example Title includes opera)
3. Once you run that search, the URL at the top will include the search criteria. Select and copy the end part of the URL starting with “/search” – that is, starting right after the “/alltitles” part and all the way to the end of the URL.
For the example above, the URL will be (ignore line breaks shown):
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/search.action?
adv.x=1&fromSearch=fromSearch&f00=collection
&p00=col_cust_acad_complete&f01=title&p01=opera&search=Search
Copy this part (ignore line breaks shown):
/search.action?adv.x=1&fromSearch=fromSearch
&f00=collection&p00=col_cust_acad_complete
&f01=title&p01=opera&search=Search
4. In a separate tab or window, go to your usual ebrary site
5. Sign in to your personal ebrary account (you’ll need to do this)
6. Edit the URL at the top by pasting in the copied search string right after your ebrary site name, and press return
7. If you’ve copied and pasted the right section of the URL, you’ll be searching the preview-only collection from your site
When you search for one or more terms to find a book on your ebrary site, and then open a book from the returned search-results list, the book you open will open to the first page that one of the search terms is found on.
You might not notice this behavior usually because one of the search terms is often on the first few pages of the book. But sometimes the search term isn’t found until deep into the book, so it may seem odd.
Try this:
- Go to the following open access site:
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/cyberbullying
- Do a simple search for dog
- Open the second book (Stop Bullying Now: Youth Leaders’ Toolkit)
- You’ll find it opens up to page 9; the first page ‘dog’ is found on
If you use the following URL, you’re just saying ‘open this document’, so it defaults to opening to the first page:
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/cyberbullying/docDetail.action?docID=80064041
BUT… if you use the following URL, you’re saying ‘open this document and search for the term dog’
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/cyberbullying/docDetail.action?docID=80064041&p00=dog
and the term dog doesn’t show up until page 9, so that’s the page it opens to.
(Note this doesn’t work on preview-only sites since content pages are restricted)
Searching between search lines is an implied AND. Within a search field, use the search operators: OR, NOT, and AND
Examples, searching the “Title” field for:
Italy OR Rome
All titles containing either the word Italy or the word Rome
Italy NOT Rome
All titles containing the word Italy, but not the word Rome
Italy AND Rome
All titles containing both the word Italy and the word Rome
Italy AND “in Rome”
All titles containing the word Italy and the phrase “in Rome”
Italy AND (Venice OR Florence)
All titles containing the word Italy and also either the word Venice or Florence
(Italy AND Venice) OR Florence
All titles containing either Florence or both Italy and Venice
Notes:
You must use regular quotation marks – smart/special quotation marks are ignored.
To use multiple search operators, use parentheses to designate order.
Unlike with proximity search, you can use quotes with boolean search.
You cannot lead with NOT, so for example you cannot do NOT Rome.
A proximity search searches for words that occur within n words of each other and in the order shown.
A proximity search is written as:
wordone WITHIN-n wordtwo
where:
n specifies up-to-how-many-words-apart the words can be
WITHIN must be in ALL CAPS
wordone and wordtwo need to be single words – they cannot be multiple words in quotes, nor can they be another search
Examples, searching the “Title” field for:
new WITHIN-4 invention
All titles in which ‘new’ occurs up to 4 words before ’invention’
business WITHIN-0 strategies
All titles in which ‘business’ comes right before ’strategies’ (they might be separated by punctuation)
business WITHIN-1 strategies
All titles in which ‘business’ and ‘strategies’ are either next to each other or are separated by at most one word, and appear in that order
Only single words can be used with the proximity operator; the fields cannot be in quotes or parentheses! Examples:
DOESN’T work: employment WITHIN-5 (south AND africa)
DOESN’T work: employment WITHIN-5 “south africa”
However, you can put the whole proximity operation in parentheses and use it as a field with a boolean operator. Example:
WORKS: employment AND (south WITHIN-2 africa)