About Limit/Sort

The Limit/Sort button appears after you have completed an Author, Title, or Subject search. This can help you focus your search to retrieve fewer, more relevant items. It also allows you to sort your results in date descending order so the most recent items appear at the top of your results list.

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How do I sort my results?

After you have completed an Author, Title, Subject, or Keyword search, the easiest & quickest way to sort your results is by using the sort menu that appears on the search results page. It offers several options:

• Title
• Author
• Date, oldest first
• Date, newest first
• Call Number
• System sorted (default order)
  
  System sorted is the default display. This sort order is automatically set depending on the type of search you have done. For example, an Author, Title, and Subject searches automatically display items alphabetiically by title.

Please Note: Once you set a sort order, it will be applied to your subsequent searches until you change it.

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Limiting your search results

Limits allow you to restrict your search to different types of materials, thereby screening out unwanted items.

1. Click on the "Limit/Sort" button.
2. Set the criteria you wish to limit by. You can use multiple criteria.
3. To sort your results by date, check the "Sort results by year" box at the bottom of the form.
4. When you are ready to execute the Limit/Sort, click on the "Limit/sort items" button at the bottom of the page.

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Year of publication

To limit your results to items published before or after a certain year, fill in the appropriate box and leave the other one empty.

To limit results to a specific year or range of years, fill in both boxes. In this example, results are limited to 1995.

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Material Type

Use the Material Type limit to restrict your search to the formats below. Note that the default setting "ANY" does not apply a limit.

ANY	No limit applied
Maps	Limits to atlases and sheet maps
Music recordings	Musical recordings on CDs, LPs, tapes, etc.
Scores	Limits to musical scores
Spoken word recordings	Speeches, readings, etc. on CDs, LPs, tapes, etc.
Videos/DVDs	Limits to projected media, including slides, filmstrips, and daguerreotypes

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Electronic format

Use this limit to restrict your results to the formats below. The default setting "ANY" retrieves all documents, including print resources.

ANY	No limit applied
All Electronic Resources	Limits to Web sites, CD-ROMs, FTP sites, etc.
Web Resources	Limits to web resources listed in the catalog
CD-ROM	Limits to databases, multimedia presentations, etc. on CD-ROM

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Journal

The Journal limit restricts results to items that are published serially, such as magazines, journals, electronic journals, newspapers, yearbooks and annuals. The default setting, ANY, does not apply a limit - it retrieves all items regardless of format. TIP: To limit your results to electronic journals, set the Electronic format menu to "All Electronic Resources" and set the Journal menu to "Journals/Newspapers."

ANY	No limit applied
Journals/Newspapers	Limits to journals, magazines, newspapers, annuals, and irregular serials

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Government Documents

This limit allows you to restrict your search to government publications published at the federal or national level, including publications by governments other than the United States. This limit does not apply to documents published by state or local governments, nor does it include those published by international organizations, such as the United Nations.

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Manuscripts

The Manuscripts limit only applies to actual manuscripts, not facsimilie editions. All manuscripts are located in Rauner Special Collections.

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Language

If you are looking for books written in Spanish (French, or English, etc.), set the Language menu to the one you need. The twenty most frequent languages in the library catalog are listed by order of frequency. If the language you need is not in the list, you can execute your search as Keyword Search using a Language Code. For a list of language codes and instructions on their use, follow this link.

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Publisher

Enter a keyword from the publisher's name in the limit box, such as Knopf or Norton.

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Where Item is located

This limit allows you to restrict your search results to a specific library. Limits are available for the following locations:

• Baker-Berry Library
• Dana Biomedical Library
• Feldberg Business & Engineering Library
• Kresge Physical Sciences Library
• Matthews Fuller Health Sciences Library
• Paddock Music Library
• Rauner Special Collections Library
• Sherman Art Library
• Storage Library

If you want to limit your results to a collection not on this list, such as Dana Reference or Baker/Berry Tower Room, you will need to reformulate your search as a Keyword Search using the appropriate location code. For instructions, follow this link.

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Words in Author/Title/Subject

This limit feature allows you to limit by title keyword, author keyword, and subject keyword.

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Sorting by year of publication

At this time the only available sort is by year of publication in descending order, which displays the most recent items first. To sort your results, check the Sort box and click the Limit/Sort button.

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The help I need isn't here...

Please contact a Reference Librarian for assistance with the problem you're having.

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