Searching – a search query consists of two parts, the search terms and search operators.
Some examples: history, genealogy, religion, "civil war", "underground railroad"
Keyword Search – enter one or more search terms in the search box and click Search. The full text of individual documents will be searched and must include all of the words or phrases that were queried.
Example
Phrase Search – to search a specific phrase, enclose it in quotation marks.
Examples
Boolean Operators – combine search terms using a logical sequence, similar to algebra. AND, OR, NOT, + or - operators may be used with single terms, phrases, and parenthesized expressions. The operators do not need to be capitalized.
AND – matches documents where both terms exist anywhere in the text of a single document. AND is the default search operator, so if no operators are entered, AND will be used.
Examples
OR – matches documents containing either of the terms anywhere in the text of a single document.
Examples
NOT – matches documents that contain the leading search term but not the term after the NOT operator.
Examples
+ - requires that the term after the + symbol exist anywhere in the text of a single document. Do not use spaces between the symbol and search term.
Examples
- - this prohibit operator excludes documents that contain the term immediately after the – symbol. Do not use spaces between the symbol and search term.
Examples
Grouping/Parentheses - Use parentheses to group words or phrases together to form sub queries (typically used to search for synonyms of search terms). Terms in parentheses are processed first. Use Boolean operators to combine terms. Parentheses may not be used with phrase searches.
Examples:
Wildcards/Truncation/Stemming - Use the ? and * to search for single and multiple letters at the end or in the middle of a search term. Search terms must have at least 3 characters with the wildcards.
Wom?n finds woman or women
Te?t finds test or text
Geo* finds Geo., George, and other endings
Chamber* finds chamber, chamberer, chambered, chambering, chambers
Colo*r finds color, colour
Proximity Searching – locates words that are a specific distance away, up to 5 words. Use the ~ symbol at the end of a phrase with a number from 1 through 5. Do not use any spaces. This feature is not available for single word searches.
Examples
Boosting a Search Term – use to elevate the relevance, or importance, of search words. Use with two or more search terms or phrases. To boost a term, use the ^ symbol with a boost factor. Any positive number may be used as the boost factor.
Examples
Field Searching – when performing a search, you may specify a field to search, such as the title, author, or journal. The default field is keyword, which searches the entire text of all documents. Search by typing in the field name followed by a : and finally the terms you are searching.
Examples
Searchable fields include:
Pre-limits – Prior to a search, users may limit the search by source and date. Sources are either names of publications or names of Accessible Archives collections such as the African American or the Civil War collection. When you search a collection you will be searching all the publication titles it contains.
Source – limit to a particular source by clicking on its name. For multiple names, use the Ctrl button on the keyboard.
Date – select a particular date or date range. Only one date is required, so the second date box (for ranges) is optional.
Examples include:
Sort by – Results are sorted and listed by relevance. To change the sort order to date, publication, or collection, use the sort by option on the main search page, prior to conducting the search. Up to 1000 documents may be sorted. If too many sorted results have been requested, an error message will appear – Results are too large to sort. Please make a smaller result set for sorting.
