“Keyword” tab tips

Here’s a way to improve searches using the library’s card catalog “Keyword” tab. When searching for an item whose author or title are unknown, using the Keyword tab can be helpful. This tab takes you to all items using that word anywhere in the details. For instance, if you recall the word ‘music’ from the title, but are not sure of anything else you can type in ‘music,’ click on the Keyword button and all items with that term anywhere in description, including the title, will pop up for you. This may, however, result in far too many items to search easily. ‘Music,’ for instance, will bring up over 5000 results!
There are two ways to make this more manageable. First, on the search page you have the option of narrowing your search to ‘type of material.’ If you were looking for a book on music, this would narrow your search to 718 items, a far cry from 5000.
However, if you would like to further refine your search you can do that by looking at the top of your search results page, next to the number of results, for a teeny tiny box that says “sort by.” Choose to sort the results by, say, ‘relevance,’ which will give you those books with ‘music’ in the title first. If you choose ‘date,’ the newest books will be listed first, etc.
In order for the listing to change, however, you must click on the ‘GO’ button. Otherwise, it won’t work!
Try out these tools the next time you’re searching.