Keyword Searching

When you type keywords in the Search Anything box in the catalog, it will look for those same words in the brief records of all the items in its catalog.

Use a Keyword search when you:

  • want to do a broad search to see what is available in the library on your topic
  • are doing a preliminary search and need ideas for additional search terms
  • need to combine two or more concepts
  • are searching for a phrase, like “weight loss”

Search Tips for the Library Catalog!

  • Use the Search Anything box to search by keyword. This is the broadest search. It retrieves results that include your terms anywhere in the record.
  • The default for Search Anything is to look for items owned by COA Library. To broaden your search and look for items at any of the four Peralta Libraries, after typing in your keywords, choose PCCD Library from the drop down menu that appears.
  • Use the Advanced Search link, which has more focused options, to limit your inquiry to a particular type of search (author search, title search, subject search).
  • Avoid searching complete questions and instead break your topic down into keywords.
  • Use quotation marks " " around words you want to search together, such as phrases, names, or book and article titles. (i.e. "weight loss")
  • Use the asterisk * for wildcard searching where you can search a root word and get variable endings to broaden your results (latin* retrieves latinx, latino, latina, etc.) or replace a single character within a word (wom*n will retrieve woman or women).