Behaviours

Expectations:

• Experienced searchers use special characters or regular expressions to make searches more powerful.

Examples:

• Use quote marks to isolate a phrase

• Assume quotemarks take priority over ANDing a string of terms

• Wildcard with the intention of picking up plurals (*)

• Substitute ? in the middle of a word to find spelling variants (e.g. wom?n for women, woman, womyn, womxn)

• Combine searches for specificity. (Archivist: “at the moment I can use the reference + other terms to find specific things within a collection, but that's not intuitive to users”)

• Narrow a search by adding more words to make search more specific

• Implies Boolean AND