Sorry, could not find anything matching

I was reading posts on my romance listserv this morning and someone mentioned that Carola Dunn wrote a mystery series set in the 1960s. The poster had read the second book in the series, A Colourful Death, and thought it was interesting. I've enjoyed Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple series so thought I'd look this one up and give it a try.

I started with an Author - Alphabetical search but quickly wimped out when I saw there were 43 titles by Dunn. Then, I decided it would be faster to do a title search for "A Colorful Death" and then use the series info on the left side of the page to figure out the first book.

When I did a Title Keyword search for a colorful death, I got no results. At first, I was worried we might not have it. Then, I decided adding the article a to the phrase was a mistake since catalogs often ignore articles if it's the first word of a title. I changed my search to just "colorful death" and was taken to the correct record!

I was excited and decided I needed to write a post warning everyone about including initial articles when doing a phrase search. Except . . . that wasn't the reason my search worked. The real reason my first title keyword search hadn't returned anything was because I had used the US spelling for "colorful" instead of the UK spelling of "colourful." If I had searched for "A Colourful Death", I would have seen that we actually had two editions of that book. The only reason my second title keyword search returned anything was because "colorful death" was listed as an Additional Title in the MARC record for that specific edition.

The moral of the story is to always double check your spelling when the catalog doesn't return the results you want. Even though we now have a Did You Mean feature, it's not going to catch every error that I make.

Several years ago I ran across a fantastic article about The Seven Deadly Nyms. It lists several other ways to accidentally mess up your search results. While search engines and catalogs continue to evolve, they still tend to return the results we asked for, not the results we want.

The Order of Search Results - Alphabetical Indexes

Not surpringly, alphabetical search indexes return your search results ordered alphabetically. So, if I choose a Title - Alphabetical search for minority report, I will see a list of results that are alphabetically close to my search term. In this case, I see results such as Minority report, The minority report and other stories, and Minority vendors.

When sorting results, our catalog ignores the first word if it is a definite or indefinite article. This includes words such as a, an, and the. Thus, in the example above, our catalog ignores the the in The minority report and other stories and instead alphabtizes this resource by the next word, minority. The catalog also ignores any initial articles in the search query. As a result, searching for minority report and the minority report returns the same results.

Quirk Alert: Normally, ignoring the first word if it is an article doesn't create a problem for the searcher. However, let's say you are searching for a book about the letter A called A Book. Since A is referring to the letter A, it isn't an article. However, our catalog isn't smart enough to realize this so if you try searching for a book, it will return results for book. The easiest way to fix this when searching is to place another article in front of your search like this. Our catalog only ignores the first word it sees so adding two articles in front gives us our desired result.