Full-text searching now available in the Library catalogue

The Wellcome Library has introduced full text searching for a proportion of our digitised items. You can now search inside the items themselves, in addition to searching across information about the items.

Why have we done this? Simply because you’re more likely to find what you need when you search the contents of items as well as their descriptive catalogue records.

As an example, let’s search for sausages on the catalogue. By selecting ‘Search Found In: Full-Text’ from the left hand options, I can jump straight to items where ‘sausages’ is in the full text.

Search Found In Full-Text facet

If I select a title from the search results, I can see where the word ‘sausages’ comes in the text:

Full text results for ‘sausages’

I follow the link to read the book online at the exact point I want to go to, with ‘sausages’ still highlighted for me.

You can currently search the full text of all of our digitised genetics books and Medical Officers of Health reports. This is just over a million pages in about 7,400 items. You’ll find more and more useful information as we continue to digitise and index the full text of our collections.

We’re interested in what you think about this new addition to our catalogue. If you’d like to share your experience of searching full text in our catalogue drop us an email at SystemsStrategy@wellcome.ac.uk.