Search String

Enter your search text string in the search box.

Keyboard shortcut

To jump to the search text field on any page that does not have any other kind of search box, press / (forward slash) on your keyboard.

If you are in the Metadata Editor, launch the cursor to the search box by Ctrl+Alt+F

Search history

Alma saves the last 10 searches in search history for title or inventory entity searches. This list is saved indefinitely. There is currently no way to clear the list (other than to perform new searches).

Asterisk ( * ) - truncation symbol

Asterisk may be used at the end of a search string with Contains Phrase, Not Contains Phrase, Starts With, and Equals when the search term is made up of several parts.

When using an asterisk instead of the entire search string, it is recommended using "Title is not Empty" or "MNS ID > 0" to find all records in the repository in an efficient way.

The question mark ( ? ) is not supported as a wildcard character.

Double quotation marks - search as phrase

You may enter a phrase search by surrounding your search phrase with double quotation marks. This can be done for all search entities and index types that have the option to use phrase search in Alma's Advanced Search such as titles and portfolios searches.

Note that if you add other text in the search box before or after a set of words with double quotation marks around them, the text in quotation marks will not be treated as a phrase search. The phrase search functionality is limited to a single phrase in double quotation marks.

When you use the phrase search capability in Advanced Search, the words contains phrase precede the search terms in your search results to indicate the type of search that you performed. The recent searches list shows the quotation marks where you did a phrase search in the simple search box. When you enter a simple search with quotation marks and subsequently switch to the Advanced Search function, Alma automatically selects the Contains Phrase option.

Articles (a an the)

Articles in your search are ignored.

Exception: Leading articles are not ignored when the search index Title is selected for All titles, Physical titles, or Electronic titles searches.

Diacritics

Alma finds characters with diacritics when you search using standard English characters, so that you don't need to type out diacritics in your search string.

CJK languages

Unfortunately, Alma's search engine does not recognize variant equivalent non-Roman scripts, such as the same character in Simplified versus Traditional Chinese, and Japanese hiragana and katakana, leading to incomplete search results if you choose one form over the other.

Enter Romanized form to retrieve the content you are searching for.

See known issue: CJK Languages: Searches and Transliteration

Special characters ( - – / etc.)

Special characters, such as hyphen, dash, slash, and so forth, finds strings both with and without the special characters.

For example, searching for a-b finds records that include either a-b or ab. Spaces separate search terms, so searching for a<space>b finds records that include both a and b anywhere (not as an exact phrase), but does not return ab.

Apostrophe ( ' ) - variants and normalization

All variants of apostrophe characters are normalized to the standard ASCII apostrophe \u0027 in various textual fields such as Subject and Title. This means that, if text in a bibliographic record contains one of the following Unicode apostrophe characters, this text can be retrieved by searching with either the original apostrophe character or the ASCII standard one.

Note that this functionality is supported for only the default searching language configured for your system.

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Ex Libris Knowledge Center > Searching in Alma > 3. Enter a search string in the text box