There are 10 ways to find information in this collection:

From the search page, you make a query in these simple steps:

1. Specify what items you want to search
2. Say whether you want to search for all or just some of the words
3. Type in the words you want to search for
4. Click the Search button

When you make a query, the titles of 50 matching documents will be shown. There is a button at the end to take you on to the next 50 documents. From there you will find buttons to take you on to the third 50 or back to the first 50, and so on. Click the title of any document, or the little button beside it, to see it.

By default the search returns all the matching results. You can change this option by clicking the Search preferences at the top of the page.

Whatever you type into the query box is interpreted as a list of words called "search terms." Each term contains nothing but alphabetic characters and digits. Terms are separated by white space. If any other characters such as punctuation appear, they serve to separate terms just as though they were spaces. And then they are ignored. You cannot search for words that include punctuation.

For example, the query

Agro-forestry in the Pacific Islands: Systems for Sustainability (1993)

will be treated the same as

Agro forestry in the Pacific Islands Systems for Sustainability 1993

There are two different kinds of query.

• Queries for all of the words. These look for documents (or chapters, or titles) that contain all the words you have specified. Documents that satisfy the query are displayed, in alphabetical order.
  
  
• Queries for some of the words. Just list some terms that are likely to appear in the documents you are looking for. Documents are displayed in order of how closely they match the query. When determining the degree of match,
  
  
  • the more search terms a document contains, the closer it matches;
  • rare terms are more important than common ones;
  • short documents match better than long ones.

Use as many search terms as you like - a whole sentence, or even a whole paragraph. If you specify only one term, documents will be ordered by its frequency of occurrence.

In most collections you can choose different indexes to search. For example, there might be author or title indexes. Or there might be chapter or paragraph indexes. Generally, the full matching document is returned regardless of which index you search.

If documents are books, they will be opened at the appropriate place.

On the Help page, there are two pairs of buttons that control the case differences and word endings of your queries. The first set of buttons controls whether upper and lower case must match (case differences). The second set controls whether to ignore word endings or not (word endings).

For example, if the buttons ignore case differences and ignore word endings are selected, the query

African building

will be treated the same as

africa builds

because the uppercase letter in "African" will be transformed to lowercase, and the suffixes "n" and "ing" will be removed from "African" and "building" respectively (also, "s" would be removed from "builds").

Finally, you can control the number of hits returned, and the number presented on each screenful.

1. You can search publications in this library by typing words to search, by subjects, by type of documents, by title, access periodicals, search by publisher, region, country, author, and by keywords.

2. To explore the library click on the covers which appear every five seconds on the home page, scroll the titles a-z list or type your query in the search window.

3. Searching for some words displays the titles by nearest hits.

4. Searching for all words displays the results alphabetically by titles. This is the default search. To view matches starting with "Z" set your preferences to display the maximum number of hits.

5. Use "quotation marks" to search for exact matches of words.

6. Set your preferences to suit your needs. The number of total hits displayed can be set up to 50.000 or more, with 10 to 500 hits per page. The "ignores word endings" setting augments the number of hits. You can change the preferences to uppercase / lowercase sensitivity if needed.

Thank you for your attention.