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Library catalogue

The Victorian Primary Industries and Environment catalogue contains all the items held by both our department and the Department of Sustainability and Environment.

Search tips

Searching for records

Enter the word(s) you want in the dialog box.people looking at paper on desk

Select the library of choice or leave as ALL to search the complete catalogue.

Select the field you wish to search from the buttons underneath the dialog box. Words or phrase searches across all key fields in the record but it must find all the words you have typed within the one field.

The other buttons search the field specified, that is, you can search for an author, title, subject, series or periodical title.

Advanced search - use when you wish to search specific fields for your word/s or phrase. The Power search allows you to refine your search and narrow it down if you get too many hits.

Punctuation is ignored.

Enter words within single quotation marks ' ' to search for an exact phrase, eg 'drought affected areas'.

Stop words (eg a, an, as, at, be, but, by, do, for, if, in, is, it, of, on, the, to) are ignored in searching. To search for a stop word, enclose it in double quotes.

Use the dollar sign ($) truncation symbol if the spelling of a search term is unknown or if variant forms of a word are desired. Example: environment$ (searches environment/ environmental/ environments etc). Note: a number entered to the right of the $ limits the number of characters replaced by the $.

Use the question mark (?) wildcard symbol for a single character substitution. Example: wom?n, finds women and woman.

Combine search terms using the following operators:

AND - narrows a search statement as both terms must appear in record

OR - broadens a search statement as either one or both terms must appear in record

NOT - second term must not appear in same record as the first term

XOR - either one or the other term, but not both, must appear in the record

SAME - terms must be in the same field

WITH - terms must be in the same sentence in the same field

NEAR - terms must be next to one another in any order

ADJ - terms must be next to one another in the order that they were entered

Notes:

  • Do not use SAME, WITH, NEAR as search terms unless they are enclosed in double quotes.
  • The library catalogue defaults to the AND operator if no other operator is entered.
  • If there are no results check spelling of search term(s).

If you don’t find anything:

  • check your spelling!
  • remove keywords
  • broaden the search

If you get too many hits:

  • limit your search by either adding more keywords or
  • use the Advanced Search option for more exact searching (by searching for the words in different fields).

You can limit your search further by specifying:

  • Library
  • Format (eg Manuscripts, Map, Serial)
  • Type (eg Audio-Visual, Maps, Videos etc)
  • Location (for special collections)
  • Pubyear (eg 2003, 1980-1999)

Display records

Click on Details to display record and all the holdings information.

Symbol NFL indicates item is not for loan. PERMLOAN location indicates item is on permanent loan and is Not For Loan. TOOLTRADE location indicates the item is held regionally and is Not for Loan.

Use the Library Catalogue navigation bar/buttons eg GO BACK, NEW SEARCH, PREVIOUS, NEXT etc not the back button on the browser.

Printing/ emailing kept records

Click on Keep to add the records to a list which can be emailed or printed.

Kept Records - you can view, print or email record information by marking items to Keep from a Search Results hit list or from the Details display. Items marked Keep initially can be unmarked by clicking Remove.

From the Kept page, you can remove all or some of the items in your list. To remove specific items, select the check box next to the item and click Remove Checked Titles. To remove all items click Remove All Titles.

Items marked Keep on the Search Results or Details display are not always retained when you click Go Back from the Kept page. Items that have already been marked Keep from a previous search are not automatically marked in new search results, but marking an item to Keep twice does not cause a duplicate display on the Kept page.

You can then Sort the records, limit them to a particular library, change the format of the records (eg Brief or All or Full, default is Brief)

View records and then print from browser or Print formatted and then print from the box that comes up with the record list, or Email