The last formal way of searching the Internet Archive, whether for content from the Medical Heritage Library or other collections, is via the advanced search function.
As you can see, advanced search allows you to construct quite a complex search. However, none of these fields are mandatory and you can enter as much or as little as you wish in any of them. You can select “contains” or “does not contain” from any of the relevant dropdown boxes to construct something like a Boolean search query. You can select custom fields in three fields to include a number of additional query terms:
The list goes on from here! The custom fields allow you to construct a highly specified search query, but you need to know a lot about your desired item in order to make them most useful.
Again, if you’re using this search function to track down a specific title in the MHL collection, the best way to go about it would be to enter what you know of the book you’re looking for — author, title, place of publication, year of publication, and so forth — and select the “American Libraries” collection. The more you know about the book, the more information you can enter into the search engine, and the more likely you are to find the requisite title quickly.
If you’re not trying to track down one particular book, however, this search function can be very helpful in returning lists of items for you to browse through: you can combine and recombine search terms, authors, titles, places, dates, and collections to create very specific lists of search results, using the functionality of the search engine to show you exactly the results you want.
For more tips on searching the MHL, check out our MHL @ Internet Archive page and as always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!