Searching the Collection
- Val Waldron
- Ange Zaytsev
Navigating the Search Bar on the Main Page
You can access the search bar from every page of the website and digital library. Expand the search bar by clicking on the Search link in the site header. There are two basic options to begin your search:
Search the Website: Search the content of the HathiTrust informational website using keywords. This does not include the content that you find in the digital library collection.
Search the Collection: Search for content in the digital library collection using the methods listed below.
By default, your search results will include all the materials that are available to you to access online — known as “Full View” — limited by the search terms that you apply. These titles are available for you to access because they are in the public domain or licensed as open access. Once you reach the search results page, you can also include materials that are restricted by copyright in your search results by specifying “All Items” under "Item Viewability.”
Ways to search items in HathiTrust
Search Options in the Collection
When searching the digital library collection, you can select Full Text & All Fields to search through all the text of all the volumes in the entire digital library, including book information such as Title or Author. Search results will list individual volumes within journals, so there will be more results. Using this type of search also allows you to add your results to a personal collection.
Narrow your search to only book information, such as Title, Publisher, and Author, by choosing All Fields indicated in the dropdown menu options. Search results will list journals but not individual volumes within each journal, so there will be fewer results. Using this search does not allow you to add your results to a personal collection.
Use other specific fields in the dropdown menu when you know the exact Title, Publisher, Author, or other book information. Using this search also allows you to sort the results by what you select in the drop-down menu.
Search Individual Collections: Search inside a featured, shared, or personal collection of materials that you or others have created. (See Instructions below.)
Search in a Text: When reading a book, use keywords to search inside that volume alone. (See Instructions below.)
Other Search Tips
Boolean Searching:
Use AND and OR (capitalized) between words to combine them with Boolean logic: (heart OR cardiac) AND surgery will find works about heart surgery or cardiac surgery.
When searching in Full Text & All Fields, use a minus (-) to remove words from the result, e.g., heart -cardiac will find items containing the word heart that do not include the word cardiac. The word NOT is not available as a Boolean search term.
Phrase Searching: Use quotes to search an exact phrase: e.g., "occult fiction"
Wildcards: Use * or ? to search for alternate forms of a word. Use * to represent several characters, and ? for a single character: e.g., optim* will find optimal, optimize or optimum; wom?n will find woman and women. Wildcard search is not available in Full Text & All Fields search.
If you would simply like to browse without entering a search term, you can enter * by itself.
Sorting Your Search Results
To sort your search results, please select one of the fields from the dropdown menu: for example, title, author, etc. If you search using “Full-Text & All Fields,” we don’t provide the sort capability because there are typically too many search results to make that feasible.
Advanced Search
Using Advanced Search, you may select multiple fields for a combined search, enabling more detailed searching. Your options include Full Text & All Fields, All Fields, and other specific fields indicating book information.
Advanced Search Tips
All of these words
Treats your search as a boolean AND expression: heart cardiac will match fields containing heart AND cardiac
Any of these words
Treats your search as a boolean OR expression: heart cardiac will match fields containing either heart or cardiac.
This exact phrase
Treats your search as a phrase expression: occult fiction will match fields containing the phrase "occult fiction".
Using wildcards Catalog Index
Use * or ? to search for alternate forms of a word. Use * to stand for several characters, and ? for a single character. For example, optim* will find optimal, optimize or optimum, and wom?n will find woman and women. Wildcard search is not available in Full Text & All Fields search.
If you would simply like to browse without entering a search term, you can enter * by itself.
Using the Full Text Index
Check the Always use the Full Text Index option if you would like to do either of the following:
Display search results at the item level (include individual volumes within a journal, for example).
Add your search results to a personal collection.
Non-linguistic content, such as graphs, charts and illustrations, is not currently searchable.
You can search for materials printed in a non-Latin alphabet. We have searchable text for volumes in a variety of non-Western scripts including Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean. If you are having trouble searching a volume, please let us know at support@hathitrust.org.
Instructions
Searching the full-text of a subset of materials
Create a personal collection of books that you would like to search within.
Search for keywords within your personal collection by using the search bar just underneath the name of your personal collection.
If you are searching for journals or serials with the Collection, please see our help article on How to Search for Journals or Serials in the Collection.
Searching within a book
The Search in This Text feature is available in the left sidebar when you open a book. Enter your search terms in the search bar and then click the magnifying glass icon to submit the search.
We offer a number of features for searching within a book:
You can change the order in which search results are displayed: by page scan or by relevance.
You can toggle search term highlighting on the book pages as desired.
You can resize the sidebar by dragging the Close Sidebar icon to make the search results wider or narrower.
Search results can load in the sidebar so that you can explore the search results while viewing the book pages at the same time. If you want your search results to appear in a separate tab, check the “Open result in a new window” checkbox before submitting your search terms.
You can clear your search if you’re done with searching in the book, or you can just minimize that section in the sidebar by clicking on “Search in this Text.”