• Getting a good search result depends on using appropriate search terms. If you can't think of terms, use the sources described in section 3. 
• Use a range of broader, narrower and related terms e.g. search for kangaroos but also for Australian marsupials or Australian mammals to find books with chapters on kangaroos. 
• In your search results, look at the words used in book titles, contents, subject headings. Use these words as search terms to extend your result. 
• Sort results by date since recent books often refer to earlier work. 
• Note any useful citations listed in books you read.

keyword (search engine style). 
keyword (use and, or, not, " ")
guided keyword search
subject headings

• Use the truncation symbol ? to search for plurals etc: enter child? to search for child, children, childhood
• Choose synonyms or alternative terms to represent each concept in your topic. Use the Boolean operators and, or, not to combine search terms:

and will find records containing both terms:fire and vegetation
or will find records containing either term: fire or burning
not will exclude records containing unwanted terms: vegetation not grassland
brackets group similar terms so that they are processed in the correct order: (fire or burning) and vegetation
See Boolean searching if you do not understand how and, or and not work (web page will open in a new window. To return to this tutorial, close this window).
 
• Use quotes to search adjacent words: 

"nitrogen fixation "Use quotes to search hyphenated words which the catalogue treats as two words; the hyphen can be absent or present; use or to enter the single word version as an alternative:"pre war" or prewar, "hand-book" or handbook.

• At Search for box, type the word(s) or phrase you want to search.

Do not type and, or or not within a box.
Use ? to truncate words: environment? to search environment, environments, environmental.
Click the right arrow and select: 
any of these to find records containing at least one of the words in the box e.g. use it for synonyms, different spellings and alternative terms
all of these to find records containing all of the words in the box
as a phrase to find records containing the words next to each other.
 
• At Search by box, click the right arrow and select the field to search. Use:

Any Keywords to search the whole record or 
one of the listed fields to restrict searches to a single field such as Title.
 
• Combine the first line of terms with the second.

Choose AND if you want records that contain both groups of terms
Choose OR if you want records that contain either one or other of the groups of terms
Choose NOT if you do not want records that contain the second group of terms. This may also remove records of interest if they happen to contain terms you want as well as those you don't.

Subject heading searching is useful when 

• keyword searching would be ambiguous e.g. 'evolution' as a keyword could produce books on evolution of political systems or books on evolution of biological organisms 
• you are searching for broad concepts like molecular genetics and need suggestions for appropriate related terms
• you are searching for books about people or organisations but not by them 

Subject headings are standard terms added to catalogue records to describe the contents of books.

Subject headings are derived from a thesaurus, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) list.

 
• Search for a book you know to be useful and click a subject heading link in its record, to view other similar books. 

In the example below, you could click on Salt-tolerant crops or Crops Effect of salts on, or Soils, Salts in.