If you go to the top of the webpage and click All of DSpace, a dropdown menu appears where you can select what you want to browse by. There are four categories for browsing: By Issue Date, By Author, By Title, and By Subject (image below). Search filters are not available on browsing results webpages to further refine the results.
Browsing by issue date is similar to the date filter available on far left of a search results webpage. However, there is a key difference between using the date filter and browsing by issue date. Unlike the date filter where only a range of years are specified, while browsing by issue date a specific year and month can be chosen from drop down menus to the left of the browsing box. Although not required choosing a month can be very useful for narrowing down what you are interested in finding. An alternative to using these is to enter into the browsing box the issue date in one of the following formats: YYYY, YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD. After you have typed the date in the search box, you then can utilize the Boolean operator AND, entering a keyword after the operator. Boolean operators aren’t case sensitive when they are used in DSpace so you can enter an operator in all caps or all lowercase and it will work the same. You can also opt out of using the Boolean operator and simply enter a keyword after the date. The same results will be returned either way!
To browse by author, you can find the author you are looking for by entering the first few letters of the author’s name into the browsing box. On the landing page for browsing by author there is also multi-page list you can click through to see all the author names that are in DSpace. Some of the author names are for people and other author names are the names of organizations, companies and governmental offices.
Another thing to know about browsing by author is that you can search by the author’s last name or last name followed by their first name. There won’t be any browsing results if you only enter the author’s first name.
To browse by title, you can find the title you are looking for by entering the first few letters of the title into the browsing box. Alternatively, you can click through a multi-page list to view all the titles listed. When you are using the browsing box to find a title you can also enter numbers if the title begins with a number; however, for titles of resources that begin with a symbol like the dollar sign ($) search results won’t be returned. To successfully find a title that begins with a symbol you skip typing in the symbol in the browsing box and simply add the letters or numbers that come after (figure 3). You can also search by one or more entire words that a title contains as long as they are at the beginning of a title; the search won’t work if you are entering a word that appears in the middle or end of the title.
One last thing to remember is if you are browsing by title, the browsing box only looks for the title of a resource and not any of the alternative titles that may be associated with it. So if you are looking for the digitized manuscript Of Plimoth Plantation then you would enter the title Of Plimoth Plantation and not the other title the manuscript is referred to (The Bradford Manuscript).
Like browsing by title, when you are browsing by subject you have enter the first few letters or numbers it begins with to get the results you are trying to browse. The subject browsing search draws information from our subject fields on individual resource webpages. The subject fields use Library of Congress Subject Headings which is a defined vocabulary for subjects a resource can be about. This means that you aren’t able to search by a keyword or phrase in the subject browsing box. If you’re not sure what your subject heading begins with you can always click through the multi-page subject list on the landing page.
If you are feeling stuck at any point while browsing, you can reach out to our reference department for assistance by email or calling 617-927-2590. Or if you are visiting our reading room, come up to the reference desk and someone can help you.
Emily Crawford
Technical Services Librarian
