Exact searching is possible in Author, Title and First Line fields. This is the most precise type of search.

The Quick Search is a keyword search simultaneously across all Austlit fields.

In the Guided Search and the Advanced Search all AustLit text fields - Author, Title, Subject, Abstract, Note, Biography - can be searched using keywords.

Search by keywords if you are unsure of the exact name of a person or organisation, or the precise title of a work, or the precise subject term assigned by AustLit

Keyword search features include:

Wildcards/Truncation function lets you substitute an asterisk* for one or more letters and may be used within a word or at the end of a word or part of a word: With wildcards, you can match:

• both the singular and plural forms of a word
• words that begin with the same root
• words that can be spelled in different ways

Use * if you are not sure of exact spelling or want to search for various forms of a word, alternative spellings or endings, including singular, plural, and different tenses.
eg. Wo*loo will find Woolloomooloo;
Wom*n will find women and woman;
Ander*n will find Anderson and Andersen
and Crim* will find crime, criminals, criminality

You can also use * as the wildcard even with searches on ISBN, ISSN, issue volume, issue number or issue period.

Searches using wildcards or truncation will be slower than those using full terms but are recommended for subject searching as the thesaurus uses mainly plurals.

AustLit automatically inserts 'and' between multiple terms in the Quick search. A search for the terms 'mines', 'asbestos', 'Cessnock' finds only records where all three terms asbestos+mines+Cessnock occur. Please note that there is no automatic 'and' in the Guided or Advanced searches. To search for multiple terms in the subject field in these searches use the operator AND (uppercase) to link terms e.g. Tasmania AND Food.

To search for an exact phrase, put quotation marks (inverted commas) around your search terms.

AustLit uses stemming technology in the Quick search to find records containing terms similar to those entered - e.g. a search for 'early' also finds records containing the term 'earlier'; a search for 'poor' also finds records containing the term 'poorer'; a search for 'rabbits' also finds records containing the term 'rabbit'. Using the wildcard truncation ensures a more accurate result.

AustLit relevance ranking works by looking for the greatest density of matches in the records. If a term appears numerous times in a record, that record will be more highly ranked than one that has only one exact match.

AustLit ignores common words and characters. Words such as 'the', 'a', 'and', 'or', are excluded for searching purposes.

Most punctuation can be omitted when searching eg. brackets, question marks, quotation marks, colons and semicolons, commas, hyphens and full stops.

The AustLit system is not case sensitive. You may use either upper case or lower case eg. 'BLACK SWANS' retrieves the same records as 'black swans'.

If you are unsure about the spelling of names eg Smith or Smyth, Philip or Phillip, precede your search term with the '!' to retrieve likely (but sometimes very fuzzy!) possibilities.

As many browsers do not support the full character set, anglicise words or replace diacritics with ASCII characters eg. in Françoise Han, replace the 'ç' (with cedilla) with 'c' (without cedilla) .

The And narrower feature allows you to search further down the subject chain. For instance a search on Vegetables will return about 100 hits, whilst ticking the And narrower box will return over 270 hits as it includes in your search all the individual types of vegetables listed in the Thesaurus.