How to Search Mura®
After entering Mura® the first screen to appear is "Search All Collections". You can search all collections or from the top menu bar, select the collection you wish to search. Once you have selected what you wish to search:
• Select your search field (title, subject etc.). WORDS OR PHRASE is a free text search across all fields.
• Type your search terms into the text box.
• Click SEARCH button.
• A list showing the number of items found appears and displays brief details of the first 20 items.
• To view a detailed record of individual items click on the FULL DETAILS button.
• Use the NEXT and PREVIOUS buttons to move through the list.
• Use the GO BACK button to return to your search screen when required.
• Use the HELP button on any screen to explain the features of that screen.
Search Limits
Searches can be refined by scrolling down the screen to the Search Limits fields ( type, location and pub year) ie restricting your search to books or manuscripts only.
• If you want to restrict items to certain dates, type in the date(s) using < for Less than and > for More than.( See Relational Operators below)
• Select from the drop down menus available for any other choices
Tip: Do not restrict your search by too many options or it may narrow your search too much.
Helpful hints for searching
• To ensure Mura® searches for a single phrase as an entity, enclose the expression in single quotes, e.g. 'cultural heritage'. This is especially useful for names, e.g. 'Read Peter' or titles. Without the quotation marks the system may choose records where the words are separated, generating false hits.
• Quite complex search statements can be made by using the Boolean operators listed below eg (native with title) and NSW. The brackets separate this into two statements.
• Mura® ignores punctuation in a title or phrase.
• Words with differing spellings or endings can be truncated using '$' e.g. Aborigin$ will produce items for Aborigine, Aborigines, Aboriginal etc.
• Where the differing spellings are within the word you can substitute '?' for doubtful letters. e.g. wom?n will bring up both singular and plural spellings.
Navigation
• Click on NEXT on the second top menu bar within the main catalogue screen to move forward through the search results. Alternatively, you can click on the next numbered screen at the bottom of each results page.
• Click on PREVIOUS to go backwards through the search results
• There are two forms of hyperlink:
1. Selecting the terms or phrases in bright blue will perform a new search within the catalogue, using the highlighted term. Do note that this will provide a search result of all materials.
2. In some records there is a field " Electronic Access ". Selecting this gives access to linked Internet sites BEYOND the catalogue (e.g. indexes, fulltext documents or electronic journals).
• GO BACK will return you to your current search screen.
• LOGOUT will take you to the entry screen.
N.B. Mura® only outputs 100 items at a time . If you have more than 100 items (e.g.254) break it up by item number 1-100, 101-200, 201-254. This is so for email, printing and downloading.
• Mark the items you want to print by ticking the "Keep" box at the top of the record.
• When completed, select "Kept" from the menu bar at the top of each page.
• Your output choices will be listed.
• Select whether you are going to VIEW, PRINT FORMATTED, PRINT TEXT or EMAIL and follow the onscreen instructions.
Advanced searching techniques
Several searching tools and techniques allow the search criteria to be refined, which can narrow or broaden a search
Boolean Operators
AND locates records containing all of the specified terms
NOT locates records containing the first search term but not the second
OR locates records matching any or all of the specified terms
XOR locates records matching any one of the specified terms but not all of the specified terms
Positional Operators
SAME locates records in the same field e.g. title, subject
WITH locates records in the same sentence
NEAR locates records which must be adjacent to each other but may be in any order
ADJ locates records which must be immediately adjacent to each other and in the order they were entered.
NEAR and ADJ may be further qualified by adding a number to specify how close the words can be e.g. NEAR4 means that there can be up to a maximum of 4 words between the terms.
Relational Operators
< less than
> greater than
= equal to
< > not equal to
< = less than or equal to
> = greater than or equal to