When a simple search just won’t do

By Heather Chistenson, HathiTrust Communications Working Group

With over 10 million volumes, and full text search free from commercial results ranking, HathiTrust is a go-to place for researchers who are serious about exploring the research library collection. Many technologists in our community who follow the HathiTrust Large-scale Search Blog are aware of the work that has been going on since full text search went into beta and then live on the HathiTrust site in 2009. We’re pleased to report that in 2012 HathiTrust continues to make progress with the implementation of more new advanced search features. With the leadership of Tom Burton-West at the University of Michigan, there have been two new feature releases in the past few months.

In February we released the first part of the advanced search interface for HathiTrust full-text search.

• Advanced search allows users to combine a full-text search with searches within specific fields such as Title, Author, or Subject. For example if you want to find out where Charles Dickens used the phrase “the best of times” you can search for: [All of these words] [Dickens, Charles] in [Author] AND [This exact phrase][the best of times] in [Just Full Text]
• The advanced search interface also allows users to set limits by publication date, format, or language. Multiple languages or formats can be selected.

We have now released the second phase of advanced search.

• Users can now combine up to four different fields connected by the “AND” or “OR” operators, and any limits set are retained if you click on the “Revise this advanced search” on the search results page.

For those moments when a simple search just won’t do, we encourage you to give it a try!

Go to Advanced Full-text Search!