Sorting based on item sets (or by category)

Hi all, I’m wanting to make it so that the items in my archive can be filtered (by the public) by item set, but I’m struggling to find a way to do it. I’ve installed the Advanced Search module, which I thought would help, but I still can’t find a way to make it work. Is there something that I’m missing?

Really, what I want is to categorically search based on a specific field. It’s a sport archive, and I want to be able to pull up all of the results related to a specific sport (the reason why a full text search doesn’t work is that, in their biographies, sometimes other sports they didn’t play are mentioned). Can anyone think of a way to do this? Thanks a lot!

One thing that might work here is to use Metadata Browse to make all of the elements in the custom vocab for that field a browse page. Then you could make a page that would offer links to the generated browse pages. That’s not really a search page but offers a direct path to the items that share the operative value inputs.

There might be some more elegant way to do this…