Library Facet Search

A search for subject:Hebrews is not the same thing as searching for one of the multiple instances for Hebrews in the facet list.

When you look at the Subjects for a book, you'll see a whole bunch of words with some double-dashes (--) inserted and some semi-colons (;). When a book has multiple subjects, each is separated by a semi-colon. You can see these individually if you click on the Subjects column in Details view mode in order to group the results by Subject. This still leaves subjects containing the double-dashes. Those double-dashes represent tiers (or groupings) of subject information. So, "United States--History" indicates a broad subject group of "United States" and a more detailed subject group of "History" within the larger group of "United States". It's possible that other broad subject groups also contain a "History" subject too. For example, "Classics--Latin--History" or "Classics--English--History". Even though "History" is found in both "United States" and "Classics", it has a very different meaning that is dependent on the parent grouping.

The Subjects facet group works by displaying all the top level subject groups ("United States" and "Classics"). If you select one of those, it will then display all of the subgroups within that subject group. So, selecting "Classics" might show you "English", "Greek", and "Latin".

If you don't care about the organization of the subject group hierarchy, then the right solution is to use a search string that searches the subject fields. For example, if you want to look for history anywhere in the subject, then use: subject:history

Note that "Bible. N.T." and "Bible. O.T." are specially treated as their own top level group, even though they don't usually have the "--" separator. This allows these subjects to group together in a much more useful fashion.