Enter a search term and enter to get started
Avoid common or broad terms such as "Utah" or "History".
Choose Text, Images, Collections, Sounds, etc. in Advanced Search to limit to one of those material types.
Include terms appropriate for your time period, such as older spellings of words ("aeroplane") and "baby carriage* OR pram*".
Boolean searching
MWDL supports searching for terms and phrases in combination using Boolean searching. There are three Boolean operators: AND, OR, and NOT.
OR
OR combines related terms and produces a broad result set. It is often used to search for synonyms, ex: car OR automobile. This will find items containing either car or automobile.
AND
AND searches for two or more unrelated terms and retrieves a narrower, more focused result set. For example, you might search family AND bible to find items about family bibles, which were often used to keep family history records.
NOT
To exclude words or phrases, use NOT. NOT further limits your search and should be used with caution, as you may inadvertently eliminate relevant results. For example, you might search "mustang NOT automobile" to find items about wild horses instead of automobiles.
MWDL's advanced search tool offers the ability to choose specific fields (like title, subject, creator, description) to search within, and you can use Boolean operators to build targeted searches. For example, you might search for a narrow term in the title, but a broad term elsewhere, such as for a name (Smith) in titles AND a place (Utah) in any field.
Search Operators
Enclose specific phrases in quotation marks – “mormon migration” or “Oregon trail” or “family bible”. Remember AND is the default, so these searches will look for "TERM1 AND TERM2."
Wildcard - use * to search for any number of characters. For example, hist* will find history, historic, historical, historiography, etc.
Question mark – use ? to perform a single character wildcard search. For example, searching wom?n will find materials with woman, women, or womyn.
