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

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