On a mobile device?

View the LSU Libraries Mobile Website at
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/m/

On a mobile device?

View the LSU Libraries Mobile Website at
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/m/

Music Resources:
Help Pages for Finding Music Materials

Back to Music Resources Home

KEYWORD SEARCHING: USING TRUNCATION IN THE LSU ONLINE CATALOG



TRUNCATION: Using shortened search terms to retrieve more responses. A "wild card" can be added to the search term to indicate the presence of zero, one or more characters within the search term.

In LSU's online catalog there are two characters that can be used as wildcards when shortening a search term.

Substituting one character

The ? symbol is used as a substitute for a SINGLE missing character in a search term. Use when you are unsure of a spelling or when you want to find two forms of one word.
    Example: prokofie?
Online catalog locates records containing either "Prokofiev" or Prokofief"
    Example: wom?n
Online catalog locates records containing either "woman" or "women"


Truncation and substituting multiple characters

The $ symbol is used to truncate search terms and can represent a single character, many characters, or no characters. When more than one term in a search expression is truncated, each term is searched for all variations.
    Example: Jame$
Online catalog locates records containing the terms "Jame," "James," "Jamison," and "Jamerton."