Primo Help: Search Tips

Primo searches for all words entered into the search box unless otherwise specified:

• alpacas llamas = alpacas AND llamas = results about both animals together

Use OR or NOT to perform a more advanced search. While Primo generally doesn't care about capitalization, AND, OR, and NOT will only work in this way when in all caps.

• alpacas OR llamas = results about only alpacas, results about only llamas, and results about both
• alpacas NOT llamas = results about alpacas and not about llamas

Use quotation marks around strings of words that you want to search as exact phrases.

• "mount hood" = results about the mountain, without results like "New Front of Hood Mount Commercial Door Operator with Smooth Start/Stop Technology"
• Search by exact phrase only when truly necessary. "Llamas and alpacas" is not a necessary phrase, and searching it would exclude more than half of the results you receive without the quotation marks.

Keyword searching is Primo's default, but within the Advanced Search you may change Any Field to author, title, subject, or several other options. These options are most effective with sources you know to exist; they may get in the way of more exploratory searching.

You may limit your results by resource type after running a search. The Refine My Results panel contains a list of Resource Types; be sure to click Show More to see them all. Multiple types may be selected at once, and resource types may also be excluded from the search.

You may also limit by resource type up front in the Advanced Search, but this is limited to one type at a time and carries more risk of accidentally excluding useful results.

Primo sorts results according to a complex algorithm that may not be ideal for every search. Of the other options for sorting, Date-newest and Date-oldest are the most frequently useful.

To construct a more complex query, use the multiple boxes of the Advanced Search in combination with AND, OR, and NOT, the Boolean operators described above:

Results include sources that discuss either alpacas or llamas (or both) as therapy animals.

It's important to leave the AND between boxes unchanged if you want to find sources at the intersection of your concepts. Changing it to OR in this case would result in many items about alpacas and llamas that have no reference to their use as therapy animals, as well as many items about therapy animals with no reference to alpacas or llamas.

Sometimes it can be helpful to exclude a term from your results. Maybe you are still distressed by the 2019 death (from natural causes) of Rojo the beloved Portland therapy llama, and prefer not to see any results about him. The following variation on the above would exclude sources about Rojo from your results:

Primo recognizes two wildcard characters, a question mark (?) and an asterisk (*). Both allow you to widen your results to include variant spellings or related words.

Use a question mark to replace a single character in the middle of a word:

• wom?n = woman, women, women's, womyn, womxn

Use an asterisk at the end of a word to see all variations on a common root:

• woman* = woman's, womanism, womanist, womanizer, womanizing, womanpower, womanhood, womankind, etc.