Database design, and information storage and retrieval

ICT for Library and Information Professionals: A Training Package for Developing Countries
Student’s Guide
5 BRACKETS (PARENTHESES) can be used in more complicated searches such as
”AGRICULTURE or SOIL in ASIA or AFRICA”.
Search expression:
AGRICULTURE + SOIL * ASIA + AFRICA
This will first combine soil * asia and then all items about agriculture and africa. To
avoid this you can use:
Search expression:
(AGRICULTURE + soil ) * (ASIA + AFRICA)
6 FIELD IDENTIFIER can be used to search a term in a particular field.
Search expression:
BIOLOGY/(69)
You can also specify more than one field such as:
Search expression:
BIOLOGY/(69,24)
7 FREE TEXT SEARCHING can be used for the terms in the fields, which are not indexed
using FST.
Search expression:
? v26: 'unesco'
This will search for records where field 26 contains the word “unesco”. You could also
look for more than one word or part of a word. You can also use this for a previous
search. If search set 5, comprising records dealing with education, has already been
created
Search expression:
? #5 v26: 'unesco'
will retrieve the records about education published by Unesco (note that upper and
lower case letters, like the “u” in Unesco, are treated as being identical).
Other operators apart from : can be used. Eg. = If the title is indexed using IT 4 then if
you search (search set 6) for a journal title “SCIENCE”, all titles with the word
“SCIENCE” will be retrieved. Then you can use the operator = to search for the journal.
Search expression:
? #6 v24= 'science'
This means the title must be equal to “SCIENCE” only.
It is also possible to use the operators > (greater than) < (less than)
Search expression:
? v26 >'1976'
will retrieve records published after 1976
Search expression:
Module 4: Database Design, and Information Storage and Retrieval: Annex 02
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