Learning Objectives

• Explore the ISearch interface and understand which content collections are available in ISearch.

Whether you and your students are using a search engine such as Google or one of the INFOhio search tools like ISearch, you need to choose search terms or keywords that will lead you to the results you want. Watch the video, Choose the Right Search Terms, to learn about using keywords with search engines.

The narrator in the video says, "A few, precise keywords generally lead to much better results." This is true for web browsers like Google and for ISearch.

When you and your students are searching for a specific book in your school library or a book by a specific author, use the author's last name or a few words from the title as your search. If you are looking for content to support a unit on amphibians, for example, you can search using a single word like amphibians.

Advanced Search Features and Techniques

If you or your students are searching for materials on a topic, you may want to use more advanced search strategies. ISearch has an Advanced Search screen where you and your students can construct more sophisticated searches. Find the link to the Advanced Search near the ISearch Search button.

Click that link to see the page with the advanced search options.

In addition to simple searches, ISearch can handle more advanced search strategies, even from the basic search screen.

ISearch honors quotation marks. If you want to search for an exact phrase, use quotation marks around the phrase. If you use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase, consider where the quotes make the most sense. For example, if you want to find information about Martin Luther King's impact on civil rights and you search for "Martin Luther King's impact on civil rights," you are telling ISearch that you only want to find items that use the exact phrase "Martin Luther King's impact on civil rights". You may not find any results that use the exact phrase "Martin Luther King's impact on civil rights" but you might find lots of items with information on that topic if you search instead for "Martin Luther King" "civil rights".

ISearch assumes the Boolean operator AND so there is no need to type AND in your search. ISearch ignores the Boolean operator NOT. However, ISearch honors - (the minus sign) in place of NOT. For example, if you want to find information about stem cells but you don't want items that focus on the use of stem cells in cloning, you can try a search for "stem cells" -cloning.

Note: Currently ISearch only honors - (the minus sign) if you use it from the ISearch search bar. It may not work to use the minus sign in the ISearch search box on the INFOhio homepage. INFOhio is working to correct this issue.