You're looking for a book, and the author's last name is Green. You sit down at one of the library's catalog computers, click on the box that reads Books and More, and type the word green in the search field. The catalog returns 1,289 entries that you must sift through to find your book. There must be an easier way!

When you do a general keyword search, the computer searches the title, author, subject, and even the notes for the word green; it can appear anywhere in the record. So, those 1,289 results include books such as Green Eggs and Ham and The Green Book of Songs by Subject; recordings by Al Green; books by Aliza Green; material about the Green Bay Packers, Green Berets, and green tea; and the CD Instrumental Music and Songs of the Southern Appalachians because a song listed in the notes is titled "Bowling Green."

Rather than use the general keyword search, click on the search tab at the top of the screen. The Basic Keyword Search tells the computer to search either the title, author, or subject for your word(s). If you want to find a book by Jane Green, use the author keyword field; but, to find Green Eggs and Ham, use the title keyword search. Although the results are more targeted, the author search still returns 457 titles, and the title search gives you 659. Sorting and limiting your results by using the dropdown menus on the right side of the screen will help, but you might want to focus your search even more.

By clicking on Advanced Keyword Search in the blue bar below the tabs, you can combine terms and choose options beyond author, title, and subject. This is especially helpful when you want to find a particular book by a certain author. For example, you can enter the words John Adams in the title field and David McCullough in the author field, so you will not have to look through all of the books titled John Adams or by David McCullough. The advanced search also allows you to sort and limit your results prior to the search.

When you know the first few words of a title, an author's name, or a subject heading, you can use the browse feature. Click on Browse, in the blue bar, and choose one of the options from the dropdown menu. Once you enter the search term and hit the arrow, you will see an alphabetical list of titles, authors, or subjects, which groups the records accordingly. You won’t have to look at every title by every author named Green. Click on an author’s name to find all of his or her books, or on a subject heading to find books on a specific topic.

Whether you should use search or browse depends on the amount of information you have about a book. If you know the title or author of a book, or if you are looking for books on a particular topic and know the subject heading, browse is more efficient. Remember to type an author's last name first. Be sure to enter the beginning of a subject or title and omit a, an, the. When you don't know the first word or the exact title, you should use search. If you don't have any luck finding a book using subject browse, don't assume that the library doesn't have books on that topic. The subject keyword search might generate some results.

Stay tuned for more information about subject headings...