Your Library guide

Search

1. Go to the Library
2. Enter your search term into the Search Library section
3. Select the field you would like to search from the dropdown menu (the default is Title).
4. Click the Submit button. Your search results will be displayed.
5. The results screen will show 20 search results on each page. Use the arrows at the bottom of the page to navigate through the results screens. Alternatively, you can sort the results by title, author, year or call number using the sorting functionality at the top of each search results screen.
6. Click on the item's title to view the item's full details or select the View full details link at the top of the search results to see the full details for each search result.

Advanced search

1. Go to the Library
2. Click on the Advanced search link under the Library search heading.
3. Select the field/s you want to search from the dropdown menus and enter a search term in the text box or boxes (for multiple search terms). If entering multiple search terms ensure you select whether the search term is also included or not included in the search result by selecting 'and', 'or' or 'not'.
4. Select any other search criteria you require:
   • Citation search: allows you to find items in journals, conference papers and audio visual material. Select the title from the dropdown box or type your own in the Other: text box.
   • Resource type: allows you to limit your search results by the type of resource (for example e-books, books, journals, reference material). Hold down the Ctrl key to select multiple resource types.
   • Year range: allows you to limit your search results by the year they were published. Enter years in four-digit format (e.g. 2002).

Subject search

Use the subject search for terms that have been used to catalogue library items. There are three categories used; subject, author and series, with subject being the default. 

For example, you could use the subject search to find all library items that relate to 'International Financial Reporting Standards' or the author search to find all items written by John Smith.

To conduct a subject search:

1. Go to the Library
2. Click on the Subject search link under the Library search heading.
3. Enter your search term in the text box.
4. Select the field you would like to search from the dropdown menu.
5. Click the Submit button. Your search results will be displayed.
6. The results screen will show 20 search results per page. Use the arrows at the bottom of the page to navigate through the results screens.
7. Click on the Lookup link next to the relevant term to display the library items relating to that term

The thesaurus search will also look for terms which are similar or identical to the search term entered. For example, if you enter 'Australian Accounting Standards Board', search results for 'AASB' will be returned. In this case the term 'AASB' is the term used by the library to catalogue material.

Searching tips

• When searching for a title or keyword, the word 'and' is inserted between each search term, this means only results which contain all of the search terms will be returned. For example, searching for 'superannuation law' will find items that contain 'superannuation' and 'law'.
• When searching the title or keyword, use double quotation marks (") around words that must appear next to each other, e.g. "capital gains tax" will find items that contain this phrase. This is not necessary when using the advanced search form.
• When entering ISBN or ISSN numbers, do not enter any spaces or punctuation marks such as hyphens or slashes, e.g. 123-456 789 should be entered as 123456789.
• Items which are available online will be linked to from the search result. Where a link to an item exists click on the 'View item online' link to go to the item.
• Use '%' in your search term to search for all characters, e.g. 'Common%Australia' will find terms containing 'Commonwealth of Australia'.
• Use '_' to search for any character, e.g. harmoni_ation will find harmonisation and harmonization.
• Enclose a search term with square brackets '[ ]' to search for all of the enclosed characters, e.g. 199[4,5,6] will find all fields containing 1994, 1995 and 1996.

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