Finding Aid Help Page |
|
|
| Constructing Searches |
Boolean Searches |
The Search Results Screen | |
|
|
|
|
Constructing SearchesThe search screens include options which allow the user to construct searches that are as broad or precise as necessary. It is possible to do "simple" searches on a single term or phrase, and "Boolean" searches on up to three terms or phrases joined by the qualifiers AND, OR and NOT. Use * to truncate: govern* = govern, government, governor, etc. In both the Simple and the Boolean interfaces, there are options by which a search can be restricted to particular parts of the encoded finding aid or to specially tagged information. The search options include: anywhere in finding aid, collection title, repository. The option selected can affect the results achieved by the search.
Boolean SearchesThe Boolean search option allows users to search on up to three terms or phrases joined by the expressions AND, OR and NOT. The terms in a boolean search are entered into separate text boxes and are operated on from left to right. This means some care must be taken in formulating the search. For example, if you wanted to find collections with information about the cities of Sheboygan or Platteville and the topic education, the search should be Sheboygan OR Platteville AND education. The search engine will first search for all finding aids containing either the phrase "Sheboygan" OR "Platteville". It will then search the retrieved set for the word "education." The revised set will be retrieved, duplicates will be eliminated and the final results displayed. At this writing, the keywords in context view is displaying Boolean search results incompletely; the software vendor has been informed of this problem. Understanding Search ResultsThe results of a search are presented first on a search results screen. Users then can view a specific finding aid in three different views: a keywords in context view, an outline view, and a full text view. The search terms appear in red in each of the three views. The Search Results ScreenThe initial results of a search will be presented as a list of all collections in which the search term(s) was found. The total number of collections retrieved is displayed at the top of the page. For large sets, results are displayed 10 at a time. The results list is arranged in an order related to the call number of the material (an order which is not apparent to the reader). The listing for each collection retrieved includes the collection title and date span, collection creator, an abstract describing the collection content, and the size of the on-line finding aid expressed in bytes. Each result listing includes three links to different views of the finding aid: keywords in context, outline, and full text. The Keywords in Context ViewClicking on the keywords in context link for a collection displays all of the found search terms in an excerpt of the sentence or phrase in which the term is contained. This may help the user determine the relevance of the particular occurrence of the search term. The search term is in red and the sections of the finding aid in which each hit occurs are indicated as hyperlinks. Clicking on these links allows the user to see the larger context in which the term is contained.
At this writing, the keywords in context view is displaying Boolean search results incompletely; the software vendor has been informed of this problem. The Outline ViewThis view presents an outline of the finding aid and the intellectual organization of the contents list in a sidebar navigator. The sidebar includes links to the main sections of the finding aid: Summary Information, Biography/History, Collection Scope and Content Note, Administrative/Restriction Information, Contents List, and possibly Additional Descriptive Information sections. (Not all of these sections exist in every finding aid.) The Contents List navigator when appropriate includes links to the major subdivisions of the contents list---parts of the collection designated as series and subseries. Each of the links in the navigator retrieves only that portion of the finding aid. Some users consider the outline view the easiest way to browse through a finding aid. Clicking on each section of the sidebar navigator in turn amounts to the same total result as viewing the full text view. 
The Full Text ViewThis view retrieves the full text of the finding aid as a single document without the sidebar navigator. There are no internal navigation tools in the full text view. You move through the finding aid with the scroll bar or page-up/page-down arrow keys. The "printable version" of the finding aid is the full text view. [Top]Navigating the Finding AidsEach of the finding aid screens or views contains a set of navigation links at the top of each screen. As appropriate, there will be links to the simple search and boolean search pages, the search results, the keywords in context view, the outline view, and the full document text view. A red up-arrow at the bottom of each page links to the top of the page. Currently when you click on "return to search results," the software returns you to the beginning of your results list rather than the spot at which you left the list to check an entry. Nor is there the option of going directly to the next entry on the list. This is something we hope to see improved in future versions of the software. With long lists, it may be preferable to note the titles of those entries which sound intriguing and then do a boolean search combining your search term with a phrase from the title to get the entries of interest to you one at a time. The results list can be printed one screen (10 entries) at a time. [Top]PrintingDepending on the browser you are using, you may have problems when trying to print the finding aids as you see them on the screen. Netscape 4.x browsers will lose the indentations of the contents list when printing. This makes it difficult to understand the intellectual organization of the materials. This problem is not present in Internet Explorer 5.x nor in Netscape 6.x.
|
