Searching the OBL

To search the OBL, enter query terms in the search page's input form. To improve your search, select query terms that are likely to distinguish relevant documents from documents you are uninterested in. For instance, Burma is probably a poor query term, since so many documents in the library contain it.

Query Syntax: Keyword and Boolean Searching

The OBL search engine permits two types of searches: keyword or Boolean. Keyword searching is the simplest option. The keyword search

military rights
will return all documents that contain the terms military and rights. In many circumstances this type of unstructured keyword search will suffice. However, Boolean searching allows the searcher to specify detailed relationships between his or her search terms. For instance:
military and government
returns all documents that contain both terms, military and government. On the other hand
military not government
returns all documents containing military, but not government. Similar to the Boolean and operator is the or operator:
military or government
will deliver all documents that contain either term (i.e. both terms need not be present).

Boolean searching also allows the user to group terms logically. For example:

(military and "human rights") not government
will retrieve all documents that contain military and the phrase human rights, but that do not contain government (the quotation marks indicate that human rights is a phrase; i.e. its constituent terms must occur together, in the specified order.

Searching portions of the OBL

The search page allows users to limit their search to a sub-section of the OBL. Users may confine a search to either the Main Library or the Reading Room by selecting the appropriate radio buttons on the search form. Selecting All sections will return documents in both areas.

In addition to the Main Library/Reading Room distinctions, many items in the Main Library have been classified into a conceptual category, such as Activism, Environment and Health. Users may specify that returned resources must be a member of a given category by selecting the category's radio button in the search form.

Title: the title of the resource
Author: the person or entity named as the creator of the resource
Description: a narrative description of the resource's contents
Source: where the resource derives from
Notes: miscellaneous information pertaining to the resource
URL: the web address of an electronic resource
Date: the resource's date of publication
By clicking the appropriate radio buttons on the search page, users may specify that one or more of these fields should be included in the search. All unchecked fields are ignored. Thus searching for
human rights
might yield an overwhelming number of results. To reduce this overload, (especially if he were searching for a specific resource related to human rights) a user might issue the same query, but limit the search to the Title field.

Search Results

Results from a search are of two main types. First, the user will be presented with a list of categories that matched his or her query. Clicking on one of these category names will display a list of all resources that have been classified in that category. After the relevant categories, the search engine displays a list of individual resources. Each resource is described by a few sentences, and is linked to the full text of the resource itself. How much information is displayed in these result listings is manipulable via the Compact search results? radio buttons on the search page.

Send questions and comments to David Arnott