Searching for stuff
Typing one or more keywords in the search box (upper right part of the page) will show you all the items that have one or more of the keywords. The ones with more of the keywords you type will tend to "float to the top". So if you search for "Fred Smith" the items containing both "Fred" and "Smith" will tend to be first, followed by items that might just have "Fred" and others that might have just "Smith" (in no particular order).
If the normal search doesn't give you what you are looking for, there more sophisticated ways to find things. Click on the ... next to the search "magnifying glass" and you'll get a menu of increasingly fancy ways of searching. (See Advanced Searching below)
Also see "Tags and Collections" for other ways to explore the archive.
Advanced Searching
The search capability has three options:
- Keyword: similar to Google Search, a keyword search returns results ordered by relevance. Searching on “town clock” will prioritize records that contain the full string “town clock”, but will also include records that contain the individual words “town” or “clock”.
- 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.
- 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.