Dear colleagues, I know this will only apply to a subset of my fellow librarians on this list, but I'm hoping someone out there may be an expert in the use of stopwords in implementing search systems. I'm reviewing the stopwords we use for searching our digital repository application intraLibrary (i.e. words that are not searched even if they are in a search query, e.g. "and"). In intraLibrary our stopwords are currently applied only to searches of metadata fields. Soon we will be using them for natural language text searching as well (like a search engine). It seems to me that stopwords for the two purposes may be different. A lot of the stuff I've found online gives *very* long lists of stopwords for search engines searching websites and entire documents. However, I wouldn't want to exclude terms like "between" from a metadata-only title search. Our current standard list of stopwords that comes with MySQL seems a bit too extensive to me, including things like "still" and "between". I think maybe it's the wrong list for our purposes. Any thoughts, advice, stopword lists or shared experience welcome. This is a new area to me. Best Sarah -- Sarah Currier Product Manager, Intrallect Ltd. http://www.intrallect.com 2nd Floor, Regent House Blackness Road Linlithgow EH49 7HU United Kingdom Tel: +44 870 234 3933 Mob: +44 (0)7980855801 E-mail: [log in to unmask] --