The relationship between terms that exclude an aspect of a topic is expressed in search statement syntax by using the Boolean logical operator NOT.
Example: colonists NOT English
This search statement excludes from your search results any records in which the term English occurs.
Search syntax requires the NOT operator and the term it controls to always be placed at the end of the search statement. Be very careful when you use the NOT operator, you can exclude material that you need!!
Most of the time, using a NOT operator occurs later in your search process. If your first few search statements retrieve a lot of irrelevant items and it is clear that most of them contain the same irrelevant term, then the NOT operator can be used to exclude those items.
NOTE: Specifically excluding a concept generally occurs later in the information search process rather than at the beginning
