SEARCH

British Library web pages
10,000 pages on our main website		 Catalogue records
13 million items in our collections
Collect Britain
90,000 historical pictures and sounds 		Journal articles
9 million articles from 20,000 journals

 

SEARCH TIPS AND ADVANCED SEARCHING

Advanced searching

Our home page search facility provides a high-level overview of the contents of our four main web resources. For advanced searching options, search the individual resources direct, by following these links:

Scope of search

Our home page search facility provides a high-level overview of the contents of our four main web resources. Use the tick boxes to select the resources you wish to search (the default is to all four). If you wish to search just one resource, we recommend that you search it individually – see the links under "Advanced searching" above.

The four resources searched are:

British Library web pages
Searches 10,000 web pages from the main British Library website. You can also browse the website pages using the menus on our home page or the site map.

Collect Britain
Searches 90,000 images and sounds from Collect Britain, a collection of digitised material chosen to evoke places in the UK and beyond. The text pages from Collect Britain are searched under the 'British Library web pages' resource. The British Library's main collections of sound recordings can be searched in the British Library Sound Archive catalogue.

Catalogue records
Searches the British Library Integrated Catalogue, which contains records for over 13 million items, including books, serials, printed music and maps. Copies of some items in this catalogue are available for purchase. Nearly all are available to view in our Reading Rooms .

Journal articles
Searches records of some 9 million articles published, in the last five years, in the 20,000 most heavily requested journals at the British Library. All articles are available for electronic delivery from the British Library Direct service; prices depend on delivery method and copyright charges.

Many of our specialist catalogues are not yet included in the home page search. Searching these will give you a more complete picture of what we have available.

Search tips

Enter search terms (any word or the name of a person or place) without punctuation or linking words such as "and", for example "marks spencer". The search will automatically look for records including all your search words. If you get too few results, try searching with fewer words.

At present the home page Search does not offer phrase searching, wildcards or searches for numerals or publication dates. Advanced searching is available in the individual resources.

Some languages or individual letters will not display correctly on all web browsers. This is most likely to occur with catalogue records and our catalogue site gives detailed advice on displaying non-standard characters (opens in a separate window).

From the Search results page, you can follow a link to All results from any of the resources. These links will take you into the full results from the individual resources. To return to Search, you will need to use your browser Back button or return to the search home page.

If demand for our home page Search outstrips the capacity of our systems, you may get search results from some resources but a message that others are temporarily unavailable. Please try again later or search the resources individually.

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