Advanced Search: And/Or

It’s possible to strengthen your search by using “AND/OR” boolean operators. 

Combine searches with spaces to search for ALL terms

Any time you combine terms with a space, the search treats this implicitly as an “AND” operator. So a search for “gorilla skull” (without quotes) will return results that match both gorilla and skull, possibly with matches across separate fields (i.e., with “gorilla” matching a genus field and “skull” matching an element field). 

Important: If you use 3 or more terms, search will return all results that match N - 1 of your terms, where N is the number of terms you used. So if you search for 5 terms, the results will include items that matched 4 of your 5 terms, not just results that match all 5. 

Combine searches with commas to search for ANY term

When you combine searches with commas (without spaces), the search treats this implicitly as an “OR” operator. So a search for “gorilla,skull” (without quotes) will return results that match either gorilla and skull. 

Important: If you are searching for numbers - say you are searching for media supported by grant 1234 OR grant 2345, so you enter “1234,2345” - the search has difficulty parsing where each term begins and ends. By default, it will treat “1234,2345” as a single entire term, and only return media with that exact text in the grant support field. This is probably not what you want! For number-only terms, you should escape these with single quotes, like so: “ ‘1234’,’2345’ “