Search Tips for the New Evergreen Catalog

Evergreen logoThe new catalog is up and running! The first few days included a few glitches, but we’ve been getting great feedback from patrons (and staff!), and fixes and improvements should start appearing soon.

In the meantime, here are a few search tips – the new catalog is a little different from the old one, but it’s also much better.

Evergreen Catalog Search Tips

  • Enter your search words in any order. So, a search for compass golden gives the same results as a search for golden compass. Adding more search words gives fewer, and more specific, results
    • This is also true for author searches. Both David Suzuki and Suzuki, David will return results for the same author
  • Evergreen is also forgiving about plurals and alternate word endings, so if you enter dogs, Evergreen will also find items with dog
  • Do not use the word AND to join search terms
    • AND is automatically used to join all search terms. So, a search for golden compass will search for entries that contain both golden and compass
    • Boolean operators such as and, or, not are not considered special and are searched for like any other word. So, a search for golden and compass will not return the title golden compass. Putting it another way, there are no stop words that are automatically ignored by the search engine
  • Don’t worry about white space, exact punctuation, or capitalization
  • Search for an exact phrase using double-quotes. For example “golden compass”
  • Use * (asterisk) as a wildcard to truncate search terms, e.g. comp* golden may return the same results for compass golden and more
  • Exclude a term from the search, using – (minus) . For example, vacations –britain will search for materials on vacations that do not make reference to Britain

You can form more complex searches using the Advanced Search features. You can also click the Advanced button under the search box to build complex searches using Boolean operator OR to connect your terms.

Improving a Search With Few Results

If only a few hits were returned from your search, you may see some suggestions for expanding or altering your search at the bottom of the search results list. These alternate search terms are words that are similar to your search terms in spelling or sound. Selecting one of the links performs a search with the new search terms.
(Some material adapted from “Sitka Evergreen Training Manual“, Copyright © 2011 BC Libraries Cooperative)