Searching by Author for Videos and Recorded Music

There are a couple of approaches you can take when searching by author, depending on how much of the author's name you know and what exactly you are looking for. If you know the author's last name, you can use the special author search listed on the opening search screen. Under "Guided Searches", select the link for "Author" to go to the author search screen (shown below). Here you will find examples of various name formats.

Problems arise when you have a very prolific author (e.g. Shakespeare). Let's say you just want video versions of Shakespeare's plays as opposed to books. You do an author search on Shakespeare, William and get a large number of results, both book and non-book.

On your results screen, press the button labeled "Limit/Sort" which appears on the menu bar at the top right of the screen.

The Limit/Sort screen will appear (see below) and you can select a material type (e.g. video) to limit your results by. When ready to redo the search, press the "Submit" button at the bottom of the screen.

This works equally well with prolific composers such as Sergey Prokofiev. Do an author search to retrieve all his works. Then press the "Limit/Sort" button and limit your retrieval to "Audio, Music" to see just the actual recordings.

Of course, there are times when you need to narrow your retrieval down even more. A search on "Bach, Johann Sebastian" yields several hundred titles. What if you just want recordings of some of his organ music but don't have a title in mind? Using the Limit/Sort option to limit to "Audio, Music" still results in a very long list and doesn't separate out the organ music.

One way to handle this type of problem is to do a "combination keyword" search, i.e. where you combine two or more elements (e.g. author and subject) in the same search. Let's learn how to do this in the next part of this tutorial.