Tips for Advanced Searching the Online Collection at the Walters Art Museum
The Walters' collections website has thousands of art objects listed within it. Sometimes, it can be difficult to find exactly what you're looking for by browsing through the site, or even a simple search query. Fear not, however, because here are some tips to help you make more advanced queries to search through the online collection.
Phrases
- Find a phrase, or an exact title or name, by surrounding multiple words in quotes.
"Plaque with the Virgin and Child" will find documents that contain exactly those words together in that order.- Without the quotes, you'll find many more documents that contain words like
the, and, child and plaque.
Plus (+)
- Precede all your search terms with a plus (+) symbol to perform an AND search.
-
+lion +head will find all documents that contain both "lion" and "head".
-
+lion head will find all documents that contain "lion" and possibly "head".
OR
- If you do not specify an operator between search terms, OR will be used by default.
lion head will find all documents that contain "lion" or "head".- head OR lion will provide the same results.
NOT
- Precede your search term with a minus (-) symbol to exclude documents that contain that word, or alternatively, use the word NOT.
+lion -head will find all documents that contain "lion", but not "head".lion NOT head will provide the same results.
Grouping
- Use parentheses to form sub-queries.
(lion OR tiger) AND head will find all documents that contain "head" and either "lion" or "tiger".
Wildcards
Match for words that contain 0 or more characters within or after the search term (note that wildcards cannot appear at the beginning of a search term).
* matches 0 or more characters of any kind.
? matches 0 or 1 character of any kind.
jo?n will find all documents that contain, for example, "john" and "joan".
god* will find all documents that contain those characters, e.g. "gods", "goddess", etc.
Fuzzy Search
- Follow your query with the tilde (~) symbol to find documents with words that are "similar" to a given search term.
-
goat~ will find documents that also contain the keyword "boat".