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How To Use This Website

Browsing

In order to browse items by tags (i.e. subject categories), go to Browse Items or Browse Collections and then click on Browse by Tag. Tags are also clickable within individual items.

Searching for Items and Transcriptions

Tips

In order to search for a name, year, place, etc., just enter that word in the Search box available at the top of each page on this website. In order to narrow the results down, click on the … button in the Search box and select Exact Match. For advanced search options, click on the … button in the Search box and select Advanced Search. The simple search option can take into account Items, Files (i.e. transcriptions), Collections (i.e. Vincent de Paul Collection) as well as Simple Pages (i.e. all pages connected to this website, for instance the Biographical Dictionary under User Guide). The advanced search option will only search within item fields.

In order to search for an exact document citation (e.g. APF ACTA 18 151v, 152r-v, item 3), type the reference in the search field and select Exact Match before you start the search.

In order to search for a specific identifier (also referred to as ‘database number’ or ‘item number’ in this collection) go to Advanced Search, skip the Search for Keywords box, and under Narrow by Specific Fields select a) Identifier, b) ‘is exactly’, and c) fill in the number you are looking for. Then start the search.

In order to search for a group of documents, for example all the documents from Acta 18, type ‘Acta 18’ in the simple search box and select Exact Match.

Please note that using “…” does not work in the same way it does in Google. You have to select the Exact Match option instead.

A detailed explanation of query types (from info.omeka.net)

Keyword: similar to Google Search, a keyword search returns results ordered by relevance. Searching on “ancient warfare” will prioritize records that contain the full string “ancient warfare”, but will also include records that contain the individual words “ancient” or “warfare”.

Boolean: allows greater fine-tuning than keyword search but does not return results by relevance. Do this by using certain characters at the beginning or end of words in the search string. Some examples:

+: a leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each row that is returned.

-: a leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the rows that are returned.

*: an appended asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator.

“: a phrase that is enclosed within double quote characters matches only rows that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed.

More special characters and further information about boolean search can be found on the MySQL website.

Exact match: returns records that contain at least one match to the order of words entered, like “Civil War”. Use this search type if you need to search short words, like “war”, and the keyword/boolean searches do not produce results.

TRANSCRIPTIONS

Finding a Transcription: The full-text transcriptions for individual items can be accessed at this link: Transcriptions. Please note that they are listed in the order of their unique identifiers (all file names start with a number; that is their identifier). To find the transcription for a certain item, first note its identifier, then go to the link above to find its corresponding transcription. See the snapshots below for more details.