When we start to get into advanced queries, we’re going to need more than just AND, OR, and NOT. So, our search would be "Book of Mormon" NOT musical. My favorite example for the NOT operator was wanting to search for library resources about the Book of Mormon, but realizing that search also brought up a lot of results about the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon. I used to work in Salt Lake City, Utah, where a lot of the university students I interacted with were members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, or they were interested in researching it. If we had a Venn diagram of items that contain ghosts in one circle and items that contain Shakespeare in the other, our search for ghosts AND Shakespeare would give us results that are where those two circles overlap. Now you only get 20 results.ĪND means that all the results in our example must contain the keywords ghosts and Shakespeare. That’s a lot! You realize you actually only wanted to see results about ghosts in Shakespeare plays. You want to see everything you have about ‘ghosts’, so you search the keyword ghosts. Imagine you’re searching a library catalog, a search engine, a database, or even your notes. That sounds like it increases my results when searching!”īut AND actually decreases our search/query results. (Side note: I always thought a good Halloween costume would be a spooky sheet ghost with AND OR NOT written all over you…a Boooooooooolean Operator.) AND But despite them being basic, their logic can be somewhat counter-intuitive. There are three basic Boolean operators: AND, OR, and NOT. However, Boolean is so much more than that! For our purposes, Boolean logic and Boolean operators should be thought of in a search context, not necessarily a mathematical or programming context. If you’ve learned anything about Boolean logic before, you’ve probably learned it via Boolean algebra and the TRUE or FALSE operators in computer programming. I’ve been teaching university students, faculty, and staff these same techniques since 2015. Why learn this from me? Well, in the United States at least, people in library science graduate programs start learning Boolean logic to search catalogs and databases on day one. (Logseq Librarian? Has a nice ring to it!)ĭuring the Query Learning Sprints, I thought it would be useful to share some basics and tips for Boolean logic. Hello! It’s me, Jay, your friendly neighborhood librarian.
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