1. Select whether you want to search the Archives or Museum catalogue using the drop down list in the top search field
2. Choose any of the options in the Field Box (This drop-down box lets you choose a particular catalogue field* in which to search)
3. Enter the word or phrase you wish to search for in the Value field**. Click on the List icons to the right of each field to help you find the right term. These lists are alphabetical. You can narrow the search down by entering a word or part of the word and then clicking on the list
4. By ticking the box under Truncation you can get results by simply entering the first part of a word. Unticking the box will restrict your search to exact matches only
5. Add a new search field to further your search terms using the Plus sign. Remove the the seach fild by clicling in the Minus sign
6. Use the Boolean drop down menu to link the search terms you want to include in your query
7. Arrange your seach results by ticking any of the Sort by options
* The fields you can search are:
Word(s) from the title: is a free text search. Just write in any words you want the catalogue to search for you.
Creator: search for people or organisations that have created archives or museum objects in the catalogue.
Object name: to find particular types of object (e.g. “Rate book”, “Doll”, “Letter”). Is available just in the museum catalogue.
Subject: search for records related to specific subjects such as 'schools' or 'World War Two'. Subjects can also include types of documents and places (e.g. Minute Books or Uxbridge, Middlesex.
Person/Institution: to search for records relating to a particular person, family, organisation, military unit or business.
With the Person/Institution, Subject, Creator and Object Name fields you can browse through alphabetical lists of keywords used in the catalogues. You can do this by clicking on the square icon to the right of the appropriate search box. You will make this search more precise by writing a term into the box. The list will then show you the nearest entries to your search term in alphabetical order.
Description or Word(s) from the content is a free text search like title and searches the section of the catalogue which describes the object or record.
Year from and Year until refer to dates. The records have a date from and a date to field. This reflects that some objects and archives were made over a period of time, some archives cover a span of dates or that the exact date is unknown.
Level of Description; archives are arranged hierarchically with descriptions for different levels of the collection. These levels are Fonds (the whole collection), subfonds (a sub collection, usually relating to different departments as creators) Series (a collection of types of records i.e. minutes or correspondence) file (usually an individual file of papers or a volume) and item (the lowest level of description, one single item such as a booklet, poster or letter).
Reference allows you to search for records with a particular reference code. All archive items and museum objects have an individual reference code. In archive catalogues the reference codes can feature a string of individual letter or number codes reflecting its place in the record hierarchy.
** Dates must be entered as year, month, day (e.g. 1815-03-07) and people’s names surname first (e.g. Grey, Maria).
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