Features – Learn @ Scholars Portal

Searching

Searches on Scholars Portal Books can include any letters or numbers, but are insensitive to diacritical marks (e.g. French accents are ignored).

Scholars Portal Books uses standard Boolean operators (including AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR), which specify relationships between search terms. Operators can be entered either within the search bar, or by using the drop down menu to the left of the search bar before additional terms. Search terms can be added using the red ‘+’ button and removed using the grey ‘-’ button.

The Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR can be entered using the drop-down menu to the left of the search bar before additional terms.

A basic explanation of Boolean operators can be found below:

Operator	Description	Example
AND	Narrows results by telling the database that all words or phrases must be present in the search results	Google AND algorithm
OR	Broadens search by looking for documents containing any of the search terms	Artificial intelligence OR algorithm OR machine learning
NOT	Narrows results by excluding specified search terms	Dogs NOT breeding
NEAR	Looks for documents that contain two search terms within a specified number of words apart (default: 10 words)	Dogs NEAR fostering

Users can select how to search by using the right drop down menu.

The drop-down menu beside the search bar allows users to select how to search, including by title, keyword, author, and more.

Users can choose to limit their search options by year, availability, and collection. Results can be sorted by Relevance, Recently Published, Recently Added, and Title using the drop-down menu.

Use the "Sort By" drop-down menu to sort results by Relevance, Recently Published, Recently Added, and Title.

From the results page, searches can be further refined by keywords, author, series, book type, language, date, and publisher from the right panel.

Results can be further refined through the right panel of the search results page.

Access

In most situations, users will be accessing books on Scholars Portal Books through their library catalogue, which means they will only view content they have institutional access to.

Off-campus users will be prompted to select and login to their school from a list of institutions with access.

Prompt for users to select their institution for book access.

Selecting “Books you can read because your library owns them” when doing a search will narrow results to books that users have permission to view. Make sure you have connected through your library’s off-campus access, or you will not see any subscribed content.

My Books

Users can save Books to their ‘My Books’ list from the search results page by clicking the red ‘+’ icon, or by clicking “Add to My Books” when using the online reader.

Click on the red + icon to save a book to the My Books list from the search results page.

The ‘My Books’ list can be accessed from the top right toolbar.

The My Books list can be accessed in the top right toolbar.

From this page, users can export citations, email the list, and generate a bibliography.