Issue raised by: Fay Turner
Keyword searching of bibliographic systems is useful when neither the exact author, title or subject of an item is known, or when the objective of the search is to identify a broad range of documents to which the keywords apply. Characteristics of keyword searching include:Many bibliographic systems support some or all of these features.
- Searching one or more words that do not have to be in any order.
- Searching for words anywhere in some or all fields indexed for the record, usually in author, title, subject and sometimes notes fields.
- Limiting the search, for example, by author, subject, title, format, language, publisher or date.
- Combining several keywords using Boolean and positional operators and expressing the relationship between the keywords: AND, OR, AND-NOT, exclusive-or, adjacent, near, with, same, etc.
- Nesting searches to construct complex searches, truncation of terms, etc.
What combination of bib-1 attributes should be used to specify a keyword search?
For bibliographic system searching, queries where all operands are constructed as follows are to be interpreted as keyword searches:
- Position: any-position-in-field (3) or absent
- Relation: equal (3) or absent
- Completeness: incomplete-field (1) or absent
- Structure: word (2)
- Truncation: absent or as supported by the server for keyword searching
- Use: as supported by the server for keyword searching (including ANY, if supported).
- Term: a single word