My Search for DVDs

I pride myself as an expert searcher. So, it really drives me insane when I get tripped up by how our catalog searches.

My family and I will be flying for Christmas and I decided one of the easiest ways to keep my son quiet on the flight would be to bring some videos along for him to watch. Up till this point, my son has only watched a few videos I've checked out from the library. However, we're going to be gone for 3 weeks which is longer than one can check out videos, even if I renew it once. I decided I would check out a couple of Elmo videos from the library to preview them and then buy one or two to take with us on our trip.

Since I just wanted videos, not books or music, I went to our catalog's Advanced Page. Next to Title Keyword I entered Elmo. Under Format I chose Video Recording - DVD and then clicked the red arrow to start my search. I retrieved around 17 videos. This was great except I remembered there was an Elmo video about pets that my son really liked that wasn't included in this list. If it wasn't included, what other videos might I be missing?

After a moment or two of thinking, I realized that the video I previously checked out was an "Elmo's World" video. Our catalog wasn't smart enough to realize that Elmo's and Elmo are essentially the same words. This is because our catalog doesn't have stemming capabilities. Once I figured out the problem, the solution was simple. I added an asterisk after Elmo so my search now looks like this. Since the asterisk works as a wildcard character in our catalog, it will find all DVDs with the words Elmo and Elmo's.