Understanding and creating operands for search limits

Before you create a search limit, you must determine what operands you need for the search expression to be used for the limit. An operand is an input or argument that has an assigned value. In Searching, an operand consists of three parts: field, operator, and value.

• The field specifies the display field by which the search results are to be limited. Examples of fields include Author, Title, Library, Genre, and Publication Year.
• The operator specifies how the search field’s value must relate to the specified value for the record containing the search field to be a match (search result). Examples of operators include “equal to,” “does not contain,” and “begins with.”
• The value is the alphanumeric string for which the patron wants to find a match in the selected display field. Examples of values include “Main Library,” “1950,” and “Twain, Mark.”

An operand, as used in Searching, can be likened to an individual search criterion. For example, the patron may want to limit the search results to include only items published in Spanish. In this case, “language” is the search criterion, or the operand, and its value is “Spanish.” A record is a match, or a search result, if it contains the specified search field with the desired value.

The following topics explain how to create an operand, and give examples of operands: