Guide to searching.
October 2008
This brief guide will explain a chart that shows a sample of how a MARC21 database can be configured, as well as a brief introductory searching guide. The indexing fields described in this document relate to the bibliographic data and does not address authority database indexing.
2.3 Basic Searching
The search box that library staff and library patrons will see most often is the persistent search box at the top of the page. Koha interprets the searches as keyword searches.
To start a search, you enter a word or multiple words in the search box. When a single word is entered, a keyword search is performed. You can check this out by typing one word into the form and note the number of results located. Then, repeat the search with a minor change. In front of the search word, type 'kw=' followed by the same search term. The results will be identical.
When you have more than one word in the search box, Koha will still do a keyword search, but a bit differently. Each word will be searched on its own, then the Boolean connector 'and' will narrow your search to those items with all words contained in matching records.
Suppose you want to find material about how libraries are using mashups. You'll select the major words and enter them into the persistent search box.
The response to this search is:
The order of the words does not affect the retrieval results, so you could also enter the search as "mashups library". The response to this search is results
Too many words in the search box will find very few matches, as the following example illustrates:
