Enter the search word or phrase. You can widen your search by using a single (?) or multiple character wild card (*), or another Boolean operator (OR). For instance if you enter 'wa?' you get hits for war and wax, but if you enter 'wa*' you get hits for war, wax, water and so on. To refine your search you can enter several terms and use the Boolean operators AND, OR, AND NOT from the drop down menu.

Use the Field and Medium boxes to refine your search further. For each search term select a field. The default is All Fields which will search every indexed catalogue field for the search term, but to search e.g. the Author field, click on the arrow to the right of the field and select Author from the drop down menu. Then select a medium type for each term, by default this is set to Any Media, but you can select a particular media, e.g. Video or CD-ROM from the drop down menu.

Select your display format. If you wish to scan a list of records and then look at one or two in further detail click the Brief radio button and then refine you display choice by selecting display fields from the drop down menu. If you want to go straight to the more detailed record, click the Full radio button and select the display fields from the drop down menu.

Click the Search button to activate the search or Clear to clear the form.