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Library of Congress Research Guides

Catalog Help and Documentation

Basic Search

Basic Search Overview

Basic Search is especially helpful for when you have an Author, Title, or a specific item's LCCN, ISSN, or ISBN known. The catalog will prioritize search results based on how frequently your search input is throughout the record.

While the results will default to a ranking by Relevancy, changing the results sorting and browsing the facets will help you narrow down to better define your search.

For more complex searches, use the Advanced Search options to search multiple terms in relation to one another. 

Suggested Search Terms

The catalog will suggest search terms from the Library's records as you type in the Basic Search Box. Clicking on any of these suggestions will execute a search on that term using the search type indicated (Title, Author/Creator, or Subject). 

To hide suggestions, use the escape key on your keyboard. 

Keyword Search

Keyword is the default for the basic search box. It allows users to quickly search for words and phrases across a wide variety of fields. It can be helpful for users who are starting their research or exploring an unfamiliar topic. Fields covered by Keyword Search include:

  • titles
  • statements
  • identifiers
  • authors
  • publisher information
  • edition
  • notes
  • subjects
  • resource types
  • format
Please Note: Boolean operators and nested searching are not supported in basic Keyword Search. For more specific keyword filtering, try Advanced Search.   

Keyword Search Tips

  • Utilize an asterisks (*) as a wildcard. Search supports leading, internal, and trailing wildcards. For example, physic* may return results for physical, physics, physician. 
  • Capitalization does not matter: Florida and florida will retrieve the same records.  
  • Identifiers searches can be capitalization sensitive.
  • Search results return up to 10,000 entries for each query.  
  • To improve the relevancy of your results, try including more words or phrases in your search.  
Please Note: Keyword search will return records that match all terms submitted. For example, if you search "Washington history", keyword will retrieve all records containing "Washington" and "history" somewhere in the record. 

Sorting & Navigating Results

Results lists are sorted by relevance as a default. You can also sort by Title, Author, and Year using the sorting dropdown. You can also customize the results list to show 25, 50, or 100 results per page.

Users can paginate through the complete results using the options at the bottom of the page. You can use arrows to advance one page at a time or click on a page number to jump to a specific page.

Tip: Because the Library of Congress collection is so extensive, some searches will yield results sets that are too large to work with effectively. The catalog can only load 10,000 records at a time and paginating through large sets can be unwieldy. For this reason, we recommend users take advantage of advanced search and facets to refine their results. In the event that your search yields more that 10,000 results, a warning will appear after the final page number on the pagination menu, letting you know that some results have been excluded. This limitation does not impact facets, so they are a great option for refining your search results to a workable size.

 

Using Facets

Use the facets on the left-hand side of the search page to refine your results. You can combine facets to pinpoint the records you need. You can also search within facets to find the exact term you need.   

Facets allow users to filter search results by:  

  • Format (e.g., digital, audio, text)  

  • Location (these correspond to locations in the Library)

  • Publisher  

  • Language   

  • Subject  

  • Genre / Form

  • Publication year (or other dates such as bulk dates, distribution dates)

Tip: Facets can be a powerful tool for sifting through the Library's extensive collections, but they have their limits. Older catalog records may not contain the data that is used to set limits, and so these records will not appear in search results. Similarly, some formats of material (such as maps) may not contain data such as language information; limiting by language will exclude these records from your results. In addition, when multiple values (e.g., several languages) are recorded in a single field of a catalog record, limits can only retrieve the first language. If relevant material is not retrieved with limits set, clear the limits and modify the search, or get expert help from Ask A Librarian.

Other Search Types

In addition to Keyword, you can also use the search type drop down to select any of the following search types:

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