Minimum Requirements

  1. Be familiar with the General Skills and be signed up for the appropriate distribution list.
  2. Be familiar with WorkFlows searching and browsing techniques and Searching Tips WorkFlows
  3. Know the difference between general (keyword), exact and browse searching and use each as needed to optimize search results.
  4. Understand which MARC fields are indexed and searching in WorkFlows.
  5. Understand the significance of the default keyword search operator “same”, e.g., search terms appear in the same field in the bibliographic record.
  6. Know and use browse search techniques to broaden or narrow a search.
  7. Know how to access context sensitive online helps.
  8. Know when to contact the WYLD Office for assistance.

Intermediate Requirements

  1. Know and use these exact search techniques: title and periodical title.
  2. Know that subtitles are not included in exact title search results.
  3. Know about stopwords, boolean operators, positional operators, and relational operators. Be able to avoid search errors when searching titles with these elements.

Expert Requirements

  1. Know and use numeric search techniques for use with ISBN, LC#, OCLC#, DBCN, tag searches, call number searches, and control number searches.
  2. Know and use phrase searches alone or in combination to search specific fields in MARC records. Also, be able to use AU, TI, SU and SER synonyms to search tags. Use squiggly brackets { } appropriately. See WorkFlows searching and browsing techniques and Searching Tips WorkFlows.
  3. Know and use appropriately: punctuation (periods, commas, hyphens and apostrophes), use of miscellaneous symbols and their replacements in WorkFlows searches (accents, ampersands, asterisks, at/each signs, back percentage signs, plus signs, semicolons, tildes, underscores, superscript and subscripts characters or their equivalents, transliterated characters and their equivalents), use of substitution and truncation symbols (? or $). See WorkFlows searching and browsing techniques and Searching Tips WorkFlows.
  4. Know how to nest search expressions using parentheses.

reviewed November 2021

Attached is the print-friendly version which includes URLs instead of hyperlinks.