Explore advanced search techniques to use in library catalogs.
Using the Advanced Search feature in OBIS, you can limit your search by Collection, Location, Material Type, Language, Year of Publication, and Publisher.
Below, explore the best limits to set when searching in OBIS for French literature from the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century.
This limiter is useful when you're searching for video, audio, or music scores; for our purposes, we're going to leave the default option selected, which is Search all FORMATS.
This limiter is the most powerful tool for excluding materials when you only want to see either physical or electronic materials, but not both; if you only want to peruse digital collections, select Internet. If, however, you only want to see physical collections, select all options except for Internet and ANY.
This limiter allows you to search only for books; the Material Type PRINT MATERIAL includes books in all formats (physical and electronic). For this reason, if you only want to search for one format or the other, you'll want to use the Location filter as described above.
This limiter may appears to allow you to search only for books in French, but you may notice that your results include translations of materials which originally appeared in French. Nevertheless, selecting French should at least limit your search to works in French and translations from French originals.
This limiter allows to specify a span of years within which any results should have been published. For our purposes, the range From 1800 To 2024 will be the best choice.
Note: Subsequent editions of works published before 1800 may appear in your results, if the publication date of the subsequent edition falls in or after 1800; you will want to confirm the original publication date of any work before selecting it for your assignment.
This limiter allows you to limit the results of your search to records where the supplied term appears in the Publisher field of the OBIS catalog record (find the Publisher field immediately following Author and Title fields).
You can use this limiter to narrow your results to works appearing under the colophon of a specific publisher (e.g., Gallimard, or even Éditions Gallimard).
You can also use this limiter to search for works from multiple publishers whose names share a common term. For example, limiting Publisher to the term éditions will narrow your results to all those records for which the publisher field includes the term éditions (viz., to include Éditions Gallimard, Les Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue, Éditions Denoël, and Les Éditions du Mercure de France, et al.). This use of the limiter can help to return a list of relevant results from multiple publishers working in the same language, or in this case, may be used to return a more nearly comprehensive list of works appearing under various imprints of— or from various houses controlled by— the same publisher (i.e., Gallimard).
Note: The operators and methods described in the OBIS Search Tips at the bottom of the Advanced Search page cannot be used in the Publisher limiter field (e.g., supplying Gallimard or Èditions will not return any results, because the the system treats these terms as a string of plain text).