Searching for Information
You can use our 'Search' function (which looks like a magnifying glass) to look for information on a particular topic, such as a family or persons name, the name of a cottage or an event.
By clicking on the three dots next to the search (magnifying glass) symbol you can control what the seach covers, such as Items or Collections or Exhibits etc., or indeed any combination of these or simply everywhere!
By default the whole database is searched (other than data attached to a particular File) but as all textural data in each file is repeated in the parent Item this should still lead you to finding anything you are looking for. If you wish to include the data attached to every File in the search just tick the relevant box.
The search capability includes three options :
• 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.