When you search for subject headings in our catalog, always assume that the subject heading is plural.
I just ran across a case where someone, I have no idea who, did a general keyword search for "bildungsroman." If this was a library borrower rather than a staff person, I'm very impressed. When I first started working at the library, I had to look up the term.
Unfortunately, a general keyword search for bildungsroman only returns 5 results. A subject keyword search is even worse, returning no results. Why? It's because our subject headings use the plural form, bildungsromans. All it would have taken for this searcher to retrieve 1,974 results was to add a little s at the end of the word.
Unfortunately, this is a pretty common problem. I've seen quite a few searches fail, including some of my own, because the search query was in the singular form. At some point, we might get a discovery layer* which hopefully will be smart enough to return results for many of these cases. Until then, if you're not using the Advanced Search page, you can try the Subject Alphabetical index which, depending on the term, may provide a hint on whether you should search for the singular or plural form of a word. If you are still intent on using the keyword searches, please, unless you know otherwise, try the plural form first.
* A discovery layer is an interface that sits on top of our catalog and searches the way our catalog should in the first place. This usually includes things such as spell check, relevancy ranking, basic stemming and more. It also often has the ability to integrate, at least to a limited extent, with our databases and other online resources.
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