Truncation
To include all the possible variants of a word or number, one can use truncation. When a word is truncated, it is shortened and a symbol replaces some of its letters. There are several instances when you may wish to use truncation to broaden your search results:
- To find plurals
- To account for spelling variations (theater vs. theatre)
- To find related concepts with the same root (library, libraries, librarian, librarians, librarianship, etc.)
- To find all records within a particular month ("2009 11 01", "2009 11 08", "2009 11 29", etc.)
To truncate words when searching for items in the DLG, use an asterisk. The DLG search engine only allows truncation at the end of a word. For example,
| This search term ... | ... will retrieve these terms ... | ... in these records |
| farm* | farms, farmers, farmsteads, farming etc. | [View results of sample search] |
| fish* | fishing, shellfish, fishery, catfish etc. | [View results of sample search] |
| dates:"2007 08*" | "2007 08", "2007 08 01", 2007 08 02", "2007 08 03" etc. | [View results of sample search] |