HathiTrust: Searching HathiTrust

HathiTrust's interface includes both basic and advanced search functions. 

Basic Search: Select between Full Text or HathiTrust's catalog below the search bar on the site's main page.

• For Full Text, simply enter keywords, an item's title, or an author's name.  You can use quotation marks to tie terms together, ( "search words") just as you would doing a Google search.  In addition, you can expand or narrow your search results by including the Boolean operators And, Or, and Not between search terms (see below for additional explanation of Boolean searching).  This function will search the text of everything in HathiTrust's collection for your search terms.
• For Catalog, select the type of search you wish to conduct from the dropdown menu, such as Title, Author or Subject.  This will provide a more focused search based only on HathiTrust's catalog entries, not the text of each item in the collection.

Advanced Search: Click on either the Advanced Full Text or Advanced Catalog links beneath the search bar on the site's main page.

• The Advanced Full Text search screen allows you to enter a combination of keyword and title/author/subject into multiple fields.  You can expand your search string by adding additional search fields.  It also provides several options for filtering your search results, including date range, language, and format, and to only receive full text results.
• The Advanced Catalog search screen also provides multiple fields, enabling you to search by Title, Author, Subject and other catalog terms at the same time.  Once again, you can add additional fields and filter your search results by date range, language, etc.

Once you have conducted your search and received the results, you can also easily filter them by clicking on options along the left task bar.  Among these filters are options to only view full text items, and to narrow results by subject, author, place of publication, and original format.

Boolean searching is a term for using the operators "And," "Or," and "Not" in your search string.  When added between search terms, these operators will do precisely what they sound like--either limit your search by looking for results that include specific results, or expand it by looking for wider results.

• And: limits your search by only finding results that include both terms.  Conducting a search for "Abraham and Lincoln" will only return results that include both Abraham and Lincoln.
• Or: expands your search by finding results that include either term.  Conducing a search for "Abraham or Lincoln" will return results that have Abraham or Lincoln.
• Not: limits your search by finding results that only have the first term and not the second.  Conducting a search for "Abraham not Lincoln" will only return results that include instances when Abraham is present but Lincoln is not.