Is correct punctuation necessary when searching the online catalog?
Punctuation is almost never necessary, so just leave out apostrophes, colons, commas, and periods. Hyphenated words are a bit tricky. To search for a hyphenated word, either leave in the hyphen or replace the hyphen with a space. For example, both music-halls and music halls retrieve records for the subject heading Music-Halls. Use the hyphens when doing a basic keyword search. Mother-in-law produces multiple records that are all relevant. In contrast, a keyword search of mother in law may produce more than 40 records, but most will be records that have the word mother and the word law in the records but not as part of the phrase mother-in-law. In some cases, try typing a hyphenated word as a single word. Although the phrase is often spelled both as bow-hunting, bow hunting, in the online catalog, Bowhunting is the correct subject heading.
Related Questions
- When I use Find-it-Fast for searching or to find databases it only searches a few e-resources, like the online catalog but not much else. How can I access the rest of the Libraries e-resources?
- Where are the Librarys computer workstations for searching OVID, the online catalog, and other electronic resources?
- How does truncation work when searching the online catalog?
