Find it at Lincoln uses limiters to allow you to refine searches to particular types of item. We’ll make changes to our limiters in response to user feedback and as we learn more about how to get the best out of the system, but here’s how our limiters are set up at the minute.
You can apply some limiters before you search. On the basic search screen you can view the available pre-search limiters by clicking on “Search Options”. Limiters are also displayed on the advanced search screen.
You can also narrow your results down post-search by adding limiters from the left-hand menu (a kind of faceted searching). Three of the most important limiters always appear at the top of the menu under “Refine your results”.
Applying the “Full text online” limiter should restrict a search to:
This limiter restricts the search to records from the Library Catalogue – print holdings and ebooks, including PDA records.
If you tick both “Full text online” and “Library Catalogue only“, you only get ebooks (Boolean AND).
The third limiter, “Available through the Library“, is the sum of the previous two limiters (i.e. Boolean OR). At the moment, this limiter is applied by default to all searches. If you un-tick this limiter (switching all three limiters off), you will see results from the entirety of Find it at Lincoln, including books and articles to which we do not have access. There are pros and cons to having “Available through the Library” switched on by default, and we are still debating this at the University of Lincoln.
In addition to these three limiters, Find it at Lincoln has one expander applied by default: “Also search within the full text of the articles” goes beyond the article metadata to look for your search terms within indexed full text. This increases the number of results, but can make searches slower, and potentially includes less-relevant results. You can see this option by clicking on the small blue arrow which appears next to the number of search results (and remove it by clicking on the small orange cross).
Other options for limiting/refining searches include:
Pre-search limiters (in “Search Options” and on the advanced search screen):
- Apply related terms (expander) – uses a thesaurus to include results containing terms related to your search keywords.
- Lincoln Repository only – self-explanatory.
- Peer reviewed – limits to peer-reviewed articles only.
- Location – applies only to records from the Library Catalogue: location and collection of print items (example).
- Others… Image Quick View Types, Language, Author, Date Published, Journal Name.
Post-search limiters in the left-hand faceted search menu: these are result-senstitive (i.e. you will see different options depending on what’s in your current search result set). I’ll expand on some of these in a future blog post.
- Source Types
- Subject
- Publisher
- Publication
- Language
- Geography
- Location – see above.
- Content Provider – the various databases and collections which make up Find it at Lincoln
Finally, of course, limiters can be combined for more and more specific searches. We are going to set up a separate, demo version of Find it at Lincoln so that we can test our changes to limiters/expanders/other search settings before we unleash them on the live service.
