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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!

In our last post about searching, we talked about how to look through items specifically in the MHL collections and through the MHL’s Internet Archive website. But you might also be looking for items with, so to speak, a broader net and want to use the Archive’s larger search functions.

From the Archive’s main page, you can do a very general search in the box at the top of the page that will cover everything and anything in the Archive’s collections. This is a great way to find out what the Archive has on a given topic or person and it works well to generate a list of items you can browse through.

If something more directed is what you had in mind, you can select a specific collection from the dropdown box on the right:

This may be most helpful if you’re looking for a given title, author, person, or subject. Reading the background on the various collections might also be useful in giving you a better idea of where something is likely to be found; for information on the WayBack Machine, the Archive itself, and some of the Moving Image collections, check out the FAQ. For more on the text projects, including American Libraries and Canadian Libraries, have a look at the Welcome page. And for more on the audio projects housed by the Archive, including the Naropa Poetics Audio Archive and Librivox, check out the project page.

If you have a title you’re looking for from the MHL collections, for example, the fastest way to find it through the main-page search function is to type as much as you know of the title into the search box and select “American Libraries” from the dropdown.

If you know only part of the title, for example, “journal of the Harvard Medical School,” try placing it in quotations, exactly as it appears in this post. The quotation marks will tell the search engine to look for the words as a phrase, rather than as individual words.

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!