How do I perform an advanced search of the BHL collection?

BHL’s Advanced Search provides a number of options for restricting your search. Advanced searches are catalog-only (i.e. bibliographic metadata like title, author, etc.) searches by default. However, you can use the field on the “Publications” tab to search publication text in addition to bibliographic metadata.

Publications
Search by entering your keywords in to specific bibliographic fields in order to better limit your results. By keyword searching using a combination of 2 or more fields you will limit your results even further:

Title
Author Name
Year
Subject
Language
Collection
Text

For the and fields, select the “All Words” option to search for all of the words specified (in any order) and the “Exact Phrase” option to search for an exact phrase.

Authors
Limit your search for an author’s last name to BHL’s table of author names.

Subjects
Search within the subject keyword database to pull up all subjects related to your search term.

Scientific Names
Biodiversity Heritage Library uses Global Names Architecture’s gnfinder, a taxonomic name finding tool, to search through all of the texts digitized in BHL and extract the scientific names. Searching for a name will return a list of all the individual pages where that name occurs.

IMPORTANT: the full text provided by IA/BHL is uncorrected text derived automatically through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. As it is automatically generated and uncorrected, it may contain errors. Full text search is a powerful research tool, but should not be considered exhaustive.

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