Searching is the most powerful means of accessing the information in Hofmeister XIX, using one or more different fields, together where desired with a date range. Four types of search are available: Basic search, Advanced search, Free text search, and List search. The purpose of the first three is to locate individual bibliographical items, and in each case you can follow a link to the relevant facsimile page on the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek website; the last (List search) is for extracting information about the items, such as a listing of all composers published at a particular time and place. In each case searching is neither case nor accent sensitive (thus 'marsche' will find 'Märsche'), and wildcard characters (?, *) may be used.

  • Basic search allows straightforward searching using one or two fields, with an optional date range. Searching is based on thesauri for all fields other than title, and where two fields are used they are linked by AND (for instance results might be limited to just the works of a specified composer published in a specified place).

  • Advanced search provides the same functionality as Basic search, but with many more options: additional fields with the possibilities of searching on three at once and of specifying the logical relations between them, either thesaurus or literal searches, and sorting results by specified fields. Thesauri may be used.

  • Free text search enables you to search for specific words regardless of the field(s) in which they appear. It is possible to search for just one or all of the search terms, and in the latter case in the specified sequence or in any sequence. Results may be sorted by specified fields.

  • List search does not find individual bibliographical items: it creates lists of terms appearing in certain fields under certain conditions (e.g. list composers published in Leipzig between 1830 and 1849, except those published by Hofmeister). Thesauri may be used.