Doing a Basic Search

The Find Tool appears when you select a subsystem and record type from the Polaris Shortcut Bar, or when you click Find on workforms and dialog boxes. You can also press F12 from anywhere in the Polaris staff client application to open the Find Tool and search for bibliographic records, or Ctrl+Alt+F9 to search for item records.

When the Find Tool opens, select the type of record to search for (object), the access point to search by, and the type of search. Then type the word or phrase to use for the search. In addition, you can use various options on the Find Tool to narrow your search results, specify how to sort the results, or get a simple count of the number of records.

Depending on the type of record, you can display the records in the Find Tool results list and add them to a record set, or select Count only and add them all to a record set without having to display them in a list. If you want to add specific records to a record set, you can display them in the results list, right-click the selected records, and select Add to Record Set from the context menu.

If you usually search for records using the same criteria, you can save the search options as your user default. For example, if you usually search for bibliographic records by title and limit the search by material type, you can set this up as your default. You can also specify sorting options as part of your user default. Each time you search for bibliographic records, the options are set automatically. For more information, see Customize the Find Tool by user.

You can have multiple Find Tools open at once. The title bar of each Find Tool displays the object and access point selected for that search. For example, if you are searching for an item record by barcode, the title bar displays Item Records - Barcode Find Tool.

Important:
Your Polaris administrator may set the Find Tool so that search results are filtered according to your staff member permissions and those of the workstation you are using. In Polaris Administration, if the Staff Client profile Find Tool: Filter search results by permission is set to Yes, you will see only the records for which you have Access permission. If it is set to No, you can see records in the search results even if you do not have permission to access (open) them.