How do I search for a phrase such as "time management" in WebDewey?  When I enter those two words in the search box and use the default "All Fields," I get 28 results, but many of them don't contain the phrase "time management"; they simply have the word "time" and the word "management" somewhere in the record. 

When you enter more than one word in a WebDewey search box, the spaces between the words are interpreted as the Boolean operator "and."  To search for two words next to each other in a given order, as in the case of "time management," you need to use the adjacency operator, "w."  A search for "time w management" in All Fields reduces the results list to 15, all of which contain the sought phrase. 

Add a number between 2 and 25 right after the "w" to specify that you want to find two words within a certain proximity, in the order given.  For example, "library w5 catalog."  If the order in which the words appear is of no importance, use the operator "n," following the same guidelines that apply to "w."  For example, "finance n personal" or "diseases n5 respiratory." 

Since the letter "w" is being used as an operator, you might wonder how to search for references to our current president without retrieving records that mention his father.  You can do this by taking care to include the period after the middle initial in your search term: "george w. bush."  (Searches are not case-sensitive by the way, so you needn't worry about capitalization.)  There aren't enough records including these three "words" to warrant using the "w" or "n" operator; in fact, if you use the "w" operator and search "george w w. w bush" you will retrieve only one of the two records that mention George W. Bush.  This is because the missed record is a built number, 973.931092, with the caption Bush, George W. (George Walker).  A search using the "w" operator fails to retrieve it because the name has been inverted; as mentioned above, the "w" operator retrieves only terms that appear in the order in which they are searched. 

Last revised: 31 January 2004