Tips on Searching the Catalog

Restrictive Search for Text Strings. The basic idea behind our Advanced Search page is to narrow down your search as closely as possible so that you can find exactly what you're looking for. This means that all of the patterns you specify for things like title, composer, author, etc., must match in order for a particular work to be reported as a match for that search. For example, to find all the works by Irving Berlin that have "rag" in the title, enter "berlin" into the Composer box and "rag" into the Title box.


Additional Qualifiers. You can add additional qualifiers to restrict the match even further. Thus, you can specify one or more categories for matching works; if you specify more than one category, the work must fall into any of those categories in order to match. You can also specify one or more performers required for the work, and there is a radio button to select whether or not you want a work to match if it requires any of those performers, or to match only if it requires all of the selected performers.


Limitations. The matching of performers is done on a text basis only, so selecting "Voice" will also match on "High Voice", "Medium Voice", etc. By the same token, however, selecting "Voice" does not match "Baritone", "Tenor", etc., as our database is not currently sophisticated enough to recognize these other performers as voice types.

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