Getting a Smorgasbord of Search Results

Imagine going to a 5-star restaurant known for its extensive menu and only being allowed to order an entrée. It would be disappointing, missing out on exactly what you’re looking for especially if you were craving one of their wonderful desserts.

It’s like looking in your digital documents for a specific term but only searching the titles and bibliographical references. You’ll most likely get some results, but maybe not what you’re looking for.

That’s why full-text searching is so powerful.

Full text searching explores the complete text of documents, not just parts like the titles and abstracts for your term. This gives you a much wider result and means you’re more likely to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Not that long ago, in the 1970s, full-text searching was the responsibility of thoroughly trained Librarians. It was not a commonly held belief that “end users could do their own searching”.1 Librarians required special training and certification and searches were often expensive and required detailed approval. However, as personal computers became widespread and CD-ROM databases became popular, searching functionality changed and end users have become responsible for their own searching.1 This has put a focus on ensuring that your library management system provides simple and accurate searching functionalities that are usable for all to get what they are searching for.

Full Text Searching in LIBERO

Full Text Searching is available with LIBERO* and means all the text in PDF, Word, and PowerPoint documents can be fully indexed. As soon as you attach and save a document to a record, it will be full-text indexed and searchable.

Searches include the ability to retrieve all data you searched in bibliographic records and indexed attachments or you can limit it to indexed attachments only.

Full Text Search resultsFull text searching can be especially useful when you are searching for historical data possibly contained in digitised newspaper articles, family trees or research papers. Or when you are searching for a specific transaction in accounting documents or the person accountable for the report. Or perhaps if you are searching the meeting minutes referring to the library funding. (View more examples.)

Whatever you are looking for, full text searching opens up the menu for all end users to find what they are searching for.

1 Tenopir, C. (2008.) Online Systems for Information Access and Retrieval, Library Trends; Baltimore Vol. 56, Iss. 4, (Spring 2008): 816-829.
* Full Text Searching comes included in LIBERO Cloud. For on-premise systems, setup and maintenance of the infrastructure must be managed by the Library.