Searching Language
- What are the main concepts of your question?
- Ask: who, when, where?
- Consider various spellings of words (color vs. colour), scientific names for plants and animals, and indigenous languages.
| Lummi |
Cherry Point coal terminal |
rights |
|
Lummi Nation
Lhaq'temish
Salish Sea
|
coal terminal
coal port
Cherry Point
Xwe’chi’eXen
SSA Marine of Seattle
|
tribal treaty rights
fishing rights
|
Sample search query using some of these terms:
["Lummi Nation" OR Lummi OR Lhaq'temish]
AND
[Cherry Point OR Xwe’chi’eXen OR coal terminal OR "SSA Marine"]
Strategies for Developing Search Queries
- Keep track of key terms and synonyms (and add more terms as you go!)
- Identify additional terms:
- Browse synonyms in a thesaurus
- Include scientific or species names, when relevant
- Consider how a concept is described in different contexts: academic, trade, popular, etc.
- Consider using Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) or other controlled vocabularies
- Connect terms using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)
- peanut butter AND jelly = search results with both terms
- peanut butter OR jelly = search results with either term
- peanut butter NOT jelly = search results exclude jelly
- Use special punctuation when appropriate
- Quotation marks around more than one word preserve a phrase as one unit (e.g. “social media”)
- Truncation searches for multiple words with same root (e.g. activ* includes active, activism, activity...)
- Wildcard searching allows for multiple spellings of words
- Hashtag: Use colo#r can be used to find all records containing color or colour.
- Question mark: Use ne?t to find all records containing neat, nest or next.
