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The Boolean Operators: AND, OR, and NOT

The Boolean Operators: AND, OR, and NOT. PLEASE NOTE. This slideshow uses animations. To view the slideshow with animated demonstrations, enter “View Show” mode by pressing the F5 key. In view show mode, Click the mouse once to advance slides and animations

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The Boolean Operators: AND, OR, and NOT

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  1. The Boolean Operators: AND, OR, and NOT

  2. PLEASE NOTE • This slideshow uses animations. • To view the slideshow with animated demonstrations, enter • “View Show” mode by pressing the F5 key. • In view show mode, • Click the mouse once to advance slides and animations • Right-clickwill open a menu to exit the show or go back to missed slides. • If you don’t watch the slideshow in “View Show” mode, you may miss some important content.

  3. The Boolean Operators • The Boolean operators are instructions to a search engine on how to combine your search terms and control what type of results you get from your search. • Nearly every search interface – library databases, catalogs and web search engines – use the Boolean operators.

  4. Boolean Operators: AND • AND makes your search more specific • A search on children AND anxiety will only return results with both terms Children in Iowa Anxiety in Iowa Anxiety in Children Anxiety is Okay Children in Anxiety Children are Okay Using AND will narrow your search results.

  5. Boolean Operators: OR • OR broadens the search • A search on wages OR salarieswill return items with either term – it doesn’t matter if the terms appear together or not Wages for Mediocre Work Salaries of Good Salesmen Getting Paid to Sleep Can you see why these two weren’t chosen? Dogs Earn Salaries Raise Your Wages Minimum Wage

  6. Boolean Operators: OR • Using OR can be useful when there are more than one words you could use to describe a topic and you want to make sure you are getting all relevant results.

  7. Boolean Operators: NOT • NOTexcludes unrelated terms • Suppose you were searching on Jazz music and performed a search using just the word jazz. These might be your search results: 2004 Utah Jazz Lineup Jazz Through Time Music Is Nice History Of Utah Jazz History of Jazz Music Minimum Wage

  8. Boolean Operators: NOT • You can see that half the results seem to be unrelated, in fact they are about a professional basketball team - the Utah Jazz. • Searching on jazz NOT Utah can fix this. The search engine will run the first search on jazz, then remove anything that still mentions “Utah”. 2004 Utah Jazz Lineup Jazz Through Time Music Is Nice History Of Utah Jazz History of Jazz Music Minimum Wage

  9. Boolean Operators: NOT • Using NOT can be useful when you are seeing an unrelated topic appear repeatedly in your search results. • Use NOT and the term (or terms) you don’t want to appear to weed out entire categories of bad results.

  10. Comibining Boolean Operators • Combine these as much as you need • Cats AND declaw AND humane • A more specific search • Gender AND (movies OR film) • Would return both “Gender in the movies” and “Film is blind to gender” and etc. • Get fancy! • (Gender OR women) AND (movies OR film) NOT “adult film” • This would be a good search for people interested in woman’s gender issues in the movie business outside of X-rated genres.

  11. Remember: • Using AND and NOT will result in fewer search results • Using OR will result in more search results • Boolean operators work in all the library databases and most search engines available on the web.

  12. Questions? Comments? Contact the Library! Ask-A-Librarian 800-930-0914

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