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Discovery (Open Learning)

Advanced searching

By using connecting words in Discovery between search terms, the outcome of the search can be altered.

AND, OR, and NOT – ensure these are typed in CAPITAL LETTERS

For example-

  • Searching for Travel Europe will provide the same results as searching for Travel AND Europe
  • To expand the results set, use the OR connector Travel OR Europe will return items that contain either term
  • To exclude items. use the NOT connector or '-' character before a term. The query Travel NOT Europe will not contain the word Europe, even if they do contain Travel.

To search for ‘phrases’ use inverted commas (“ ”).

  • The query “teacher education” will find results with that phrase
  • Using OR, multiple phrases can be searched, such as “teacher education” OR “educator training”.

Searches can also be done using the wildcards - question mark (?) and asterisk (*).

  • A question mark (?) matched any one character. For example, to find ‘Olsen’ or ‘Olson’ search for Ols?n
  • An asterisk (*) matches zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word. For example, searching ‘Ch*ter’ matches ‘Charter’, ‘Character’, and ‘Chapter’. Or, used at the end of a word, such as ‘Temp*’ matches all suffixes such as ‘Temptation’, ‘Temple’ and ‘Temporary’.