The default is Normal which means that the search will be performed on "all fields" while Advanced gives you the opportunity for fine tuning your search arguments by limiting them to certain fields only.
+ and & for operator AND (also the default)
/ and | for operator OR
- and ! for operator ANDNOT
Wildcards are the '?' for one character and the '*' for zero or more characters and they can be used anywhere in the string. All meaningless symbols like the ; * @ . : / ? # & etcetera will be skipped in indexing, so you have to search for U.K. by typing UK (or uk of course).
As only indexes made by the IHS library catalogue are used, there is no possibility for an Adjacent operator. IHS library catalogue itself provides a way to index compound keys by linking the words by an underscore (olympic_games) which mechanism is supported by CardWeb as well.
The default collating sequence used by IHS library catalogue for indexing, creates three index entries for the string 'on-line': on, line & online. So if you are looking for such words, please enter the whole string without the hyphen because the '-' is reserved for the ANDNOT operator.
Here no wildcards though there is the ':' wildcard for ranges (see below). In a IHS library catalogue database the separators '/', '-' and '.' are used to store a date in the following formats:
dd/mm/yyyy mm-dd-yyyy yyyy.mm.dd.
While the '/' and '-' are reserved for the operators OR and ANDNOT, you must surround your search string with the double quote to strip these characters of their special meaning (i.e. "04/07/1976"). You are nevertheless allowed to use all the three formats to specify your search.
In dates and numbers you can use the colon ':' meaning "from
up-to". Let's suppose that we need all year 2000 dates, stored in the
format dd/mm/yyyy, you can then ask "01/01/2000:31/12/2000" (2000:2001
will do also).
| Organi?ation | Retrieves both organization and organisation |
| inst* | Retrieves institute and all strings starting with 'inst' like institution and instant |
| s*n | Retrieves soon, but also sin, son, sun, seen, swan, satisfaction and so_on... |
| *room | Retrieves bedroom and all strings ending with 'room' like classroom and headroom |
| housing /development +india | Retrieves both housing and development in India |
| housing /development -india | Retrieves both housing and development not in India |
| "housing development" | Retrieves housing_development |
| housing_development | Retrieves housing_development |
| housing development | Which means for IHS library catalogue: housing AND development |
| 22/07/1999 | Which means for IHS library catalogue: 22 OR 07 OR 1999 |
| "04-07-1976" | Which means for IHS library catalogue: the 7th of April 1976 (and not the 4th of July 1976) |
| "2?/07/1999" | Has no meaning for IHS library catalogue and will retrieve nothing (use "20/07/1999:29/07/1999") |
| on-line | Which means for IHS library catalogue: on ANDNOT line (it is better to use online) |