Search everything we have access to online and on the shelf, or search the Library catalogue for eBooks and physical items held in the libraries.
Sign in with your Polytechnic username and password (same as Moodle) to get better results.
Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) must be entered in capital letters or the search will include all terms.
Use of AND is not required between keywords so these examples will find the same result
e.g. water (fluoride OR fluoridation) ...same result as: e.g. water AND (fluoride OR fluoridation)
e.g. water AND fluoride AND teeth ...same result as: e.g. water fluoride teeth
Use OR to find either a word or phrase in your search results
e.g. student OR learner
e.g. "secondary school" OR "high school"
Use NOT to exclude a word or phrase from your search results
e.g. fish NOT whales
Searches without OR or NOT will find all terms
e.g. "Treaty of Waitangi" partner* rights
Group terms within a search using parentheses:
e.g. shakespeare (drama OR tragedy)
e.g. "food preparation" (safety OR rules)
Use Boolean operators in Advanced Search too.
Use phrase searching to get more specific results
e.g. "gold mining" otago
Use the wildcard or truncation symbol (*) to find alternative word endings
e.g. mine* will find mines, miner, mineralogy, minerals...
From May 2015 your original search term/s will be expanded to include inflections; also known as lemmatisation:
e.g. root form of a word: going will find go, computers will find computer
e.g. noun plurals: human right will find human rights
e.g. verbs: go will find went, gone and goes
Use this wildcard symbol within a word to find single letter variations
e.g. wom?n
Wildcard symbols do not work on the front of a search term.
e.g. *aying or ?aying will not find saying or playing, it will only search for aying