Using Facets

Facets

Quicksearch provides facets as a way to get to specific material. Understanding facets and how they work will help you get the most functionality out of Quicksearch. Facets are categories of results and are listed under Refine on the left side of results. Individual facet values are the metadata in records. 

Catalog Facet Categories

  • Format (books, journals, microforms, etc.)
  • Publication Date
  • Author
  • Recently Added: dates of new records added between the past week and the past year 
  • Location: Physical location of the item within the Yale Library system, or Online for digital material.
  • Language
  • Subject: metadata for the topic covered by the material.
  • Subject (Region): metadata for the area of the world covered in the material.
  • Subject (Era): metadata for the time period covered in the material.
  • Subject (Genre): category of artistic form or content. Examples are biographies, handbooks, fiction, etc.
  • Special Collections Subject: headings created by Yale catalogers for our collections 
  • LC Class: the code representing the physical location of the item. Only Library of Congress call numbers are included.

Hint: When you expand a facet (click on the >) only a subset of the most common results will display. To see all facet values select more at the bottom of the list. 

Online Results

The Show Online Results Only button may be toggled on and off.

Combine Facets

You may choose one or multiple facets by clicking on a value. When you select multiple values within a category, the search is very restrictive (an AND). After selecting more than one facet value within format, for example, you will see that those values are listed at the top of the search with the term All Of displayed before them. The image below shows a search for Human Rights limited to both of the facet values Books and Online.

That search shows 36,259 results. You can make the set bigger with all the books plus all the online material by changing All Of to Any Of, which produces 88,724 results.