Finding and Requesting Research Center Materials: Search the Online Catalog

Entering Your Search Terms:

• The online catalog will search all of the words that you type unless you use OR or NOT in the search string. A search for ceramics or pottery will retrieve different results than a search for ceramics OR pottery, and a search for Irish not Celtic will retrieve different results than a search for Irish NOT Celtic.
• To search for items as a phrase, enclose them in quotation marks:
  • "Armory Show"
  • "Art Institute of Chicago"

If no quotation marks are used, Primo will find all results that include any of the individual words in the phrase regardless of whether they are adjacent to one another. 

Wildcards:

• Enter a question mark for a single-character wildcard. For example, wom?n will retrieve materials containing the keywords woman or women.
• Enter an asterisk as a multiple-character wildcard. For example, print* will retrieve material containing the keywords prints, printing, or printed. 
• Wildcards may only be used within or at the end of words. A search for *typical will only retrieve material containing the keyword typical, but would not expand the search to include atypical or prototypical. 

Grouping Terms:

Parenthesis can be used to group terms within your query. For example: 

• To search for materials on either of the Chicago world expositions, search for:
  • Chicago (World's Columbian OR Century of Progress)
• To search for materials on painting or sculpture in Renaissance Italy, search for:
  • (Renaissance Italy) AND (painting OR sculpture)

Auction Catalogs:

You can search for auction catalogs by date of sale using the yyyymmdd structure (for example, 20210916) or by searching for the date as keywords (for example, September 16, 2021).

Sales can also be searched by auction house, sale code, collector, or keyword.

Search the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries

Input a keyword into the box and click Search to begin searching the online library catalog.

Browsing:

In order to replicate the serendipity of glancing over open stacks, you can use the browse tab on the online catalog. The browse feature allows you to look through collections of like materials in the physical library collection. You can browse by subject, author, or title. Click the entry to see associated records.

Enter subjects with or without punctuation. For example, to locate information on 20th-century American watercolor exhibitions, you can enter either:

• Watercolor painting, American -- 20th century -- Exhibitions
• watercolor painting american 20th century exhibitions

Enter human subjects last-name first or according to the recognized authority heading:

• Richter, Gerhard
• Master of the Housebook
• Toyen

Enter authors last-name first or according to the recognized authority heading:

• Sullivan, Louis
• Gogh, Vincent van
• Leonardo, da Vinci
• Art Institute of Chicago. Department of Education

You can enter titles with or without initial articles:

• Croquis 
• El Croquis

You can browse by Dewey Decimal call number or Library of Congress call number, as well as by author, subject, or title. Enter call numbers with correct spacing and punctuation. For example:

• Enter 741.64095 T633d 2004 to browse Dewey Decimal call numbers near 741.64095 T633d 2004
• Enter N5760 .P75 1990 to browse Library of Congress call numbers near N5760 .P75 1990.

Filtering:

Filters are on the left side of your results screen. You can filter your search results by subject, author, date, format, language, location, and more. The default results sort is relevance, but this may be changed to author, title, or date.