Caution: LII is a small database of about 17,000 items. The search strategies you use for Google or other search engines may not work well in LII. 

See also Basic Search Tips and Help for an overview of LII search capabilities, and  Understanding Search Results for insight into our search results and tips for emailing and printing LII items.

Advanced Search and Basic Search: Similarities

LII Advanced Search includes all of the functions of our Basic Search except spell-checking. 

LII Advanced Search supports search operators such as and, or and not, wildcarding, nesting, quoted expressions, and stemming. Search results are displayed ranked by relevance. Terms matching titles, keywords, topics, and URLs are highlighted (bolded) on the search results page. The terms matched against the "View Info" field are not highlighted. 

Advanced Search has three more features than Basic Search: fielded searching, date searching, and exact word matching (the ability to disable stemming).

Additionally, spell-checking is not enabled in advanced search.

In fielded searching, you can use the Advanced Search dropdown box to limit your search against the content of specified LII fields. For experienced searchers familiar with the LII database, fielded searching can yield very precise results. For example, try a title search for women, or a Subtopic search for BSE.

A list of searchable LII fields is at the end of this help file.

(Note: to retrieve older issues of "New This Week," see the LII New This Week Archive.) 

Date searching--the "published by" field--allows you to limit searches by the dates we added items to LII. This is very useful for locating items where you remember one or two terms related to the item and have a general idea when it was added to LII.

To see date searching in action, try an "All Fields" search for items with the terms civil rights then repeat the search and add a date limit the list for items added to LII in the last six months.

Limit to Domains/Sites: You can limit a search to items found in a particular top level domain (.org, .edu, .com, etc.) or even within a site. Try an All Fields search for September 11 limited to the .edu domain, or try an All Fields search for women limited to the fao.orgsite

Exact word matching, or stemming, is similar to truncation (wildcarding), but more powerful.

In LII Advanced Search, you can disable stemming for more precise search results. Disabling stemming is a particularly useful strategy for words that our stemming software is not good with, such as communism or authority.  If you find you have too many results, try disabling stemming.  Try an advanced search for communism with and without exact word matching to see the difference. 

LII power search tip: you can disable stemming and still use right truncation (wildcarding).  Try a search for communis* with stemming disabled.  You will retrieve items matching communist, communism, and communists (but not communities or communicable).

In Advanced Search, LII items have ten publicly searchable fields, plus domain limiters and date searching.

Keyword: A combined search against these LII fields: Description, Title, URL, Library of Congress Subjects, Keywords,  LII Topics, and Added Keywords. Does not search Publisher, Site Author, Sponsor, or Date.  

All Fields: This field searches against Title, Description, URL, LC Subject Heading, Topic, and Subtopic. "All Fields" does not include Publisher, Site Author, or system metadata. (We considered calling this feature Some Fields.)

Title: The title of the website, usually taken from the opening page of the site.

Description: LII's annotation describing the website, written by LII editors.

Topic: The LII Topic assigned to the item. LII has over 300 primary topics and over 15,000 subtopics, based on a vocabulary created and managed by LII staff. Try a Topic field search for Literary Movements.

Subtopic: The LII Subtopic assigned to the item. LII has over 15,000 subtopics, based on a vocabulary created and managed by LII staff. Try a Subtopic field search for baby names.

Library of Congress Subject: These terms are also used in traditional book catalogs. We add LC Subjects to LII items for compatibility with international library standards. Note: LC subjects can be arcane and counter-intuitive. Searching by LC Subject can yield few or no results.

Sponsor: LII has partnered with other agencies to produce some of its content. You can limit to the Sponsor field to see these items. Current partner codes are CDL (California Digital Library) and WSL (Washington State Library).

Publisher: The publisher of the website, such as ACLU or Library of Congress. Note: our naming conventions for this field are somewhat casual. Compare a publisher search for ACLU and American Civil Liberties Union.

Site Author: The site author is the creator of the website (often but not always the webmaster). Note: do not confuse Site Author with the author of material discussed on the website. Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare are not webmasters. Use an "All Fields" search to locate items about Poe or Shakespeare.

Basic Search Tips and Help provides an overview of LII search capabilities. Understanding Search Results offers insight into our search results and tips for emailing and printing LII items.