From WorldCat Developers' Network
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WorldCat Search API: Indexes
See also the Tips for specific indexes and the indexes offered at each Service Level.
SRU Relations included in the service
There are three valid SRU Relation options in the WorldCat Search API.
Relations information
The Exact phrase will start and end with the exact terms of the phrase. This is also called an anchored phrase search. The Proximity search is using WITH between terms with no words separating the words. This is sometimes called an unanchored phrase search.
* Exact provides a phrase search * = provides a keyword proximity search * All provides a keyword search places AND between the search terms
Boolean operators
Terms can also be combined using the Boolean operators of AND, OR, and NOT. So for example the following is doing a search for civil war with different operators.
* ?query=srw.ti+all+%22civil%22+or+srw.ti+all+%22war%22 * ?query=srw.ti+all+%22civil%22+and+srw.ti+all+%22war%22 * ?query=srw.ti+all+%22civil%22+not+srw.ti+all+%22war%22
Records included in the service
In general the WorldCat API searching experience is unique to this service, borrowing from a number of different services. It is searching only the cataloged records provided by our cataloging members and found in such services as the cataloging service found in Connexion or the reference service found in FirstSearch WorldCat. However the results are collected up so that records that are of the same edition are grouped together and represented by a single record. This editions grouping of records is using the same process used in WorldCat.org. However, WorldCat.org has many additional records that are not part of the cataloged records provided by members. These additional records found in WorldCat.org and not in the API have the label Database and the source of data in the full record display in WorldCat.org.
The WorldCat API includes only the bibliographic records cataloged by its member libraries. This is the same database found in Connexion’s or FirstSearch’s WorldCat. It is not the same database found in WorldCat.org. Some records in WorldCat.org have been added from other data sources. Those records
Stopwords
The keyword indexes have the following stop words -- a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, from, had, have, he, her, his, in, is, it, not, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, which, with, you.
Phrase indexes have no stopwords.
Some indexes have exceptions to the list of stopwords. These differences are:
1) Author, Corporate/Conference Name, and Personal Name indexes have no stopwords.
2) Place of Publication and Subjects does not have the following stopwords: an, as, at, be, by, if, in, is, it, on, or, so, to.
3) Access Method also has two more stopwords: http and https.
Phrase searches searching within subfields
The phrase index assumes that the search string matches the data being searched in its entirety. Further the data searched in the phrase index includes all the data within a single subfield of a Bibliographic MARC record.
So for example the subject phrase includes all the data in the marc subfields such as 650/a,x,y,z. So if there is an example record which includes [650 #a Nuclear Power Plants #x Safety Measures #z California] then the searches that would be entered to retrieve this record would be “nuclear power plants” and “safety measures” and “California”. Each portion of the data is handled as a distinct phrase search. The suggested strategy in searching for records that contain those subheadings is to and those terms together.
Limits
Limits are only available for searching if it is included with a Boolean AND or NOT to another search term from a non-limit index. Limits can not be searched alone or combined with a Boolean OR.
