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Library of Congress >> Search
Finding Aids (full view)
This search screen includes options for "simple" keyword searches on a word or words.
Search for Word or Phrase
How to Format Search Terms
- Common words such as and, not, and the are ignored by the search engine.
-
Case of letters is ignored. For example, Civil and civil are treated
the same.
- Diacritic characters (accent marks, in non-English text) produce inaccurate
results, so plain unaccented letters
should be substituted for letters with diacritics; for instance, search "munoz",
not "muñoz."
- When searching within the document using the browser's "find" command,
enter the search term both with and without diacritics to find
all occurrences
- Special characters (such as ampersands) and most punctuation (such as periods,
commas, and quotation marks) are ignored
in searching. Apostrophes and hyphens are changed into spaces.
Search for a Phrase
- Do not put quotation marks around the phrase being searched.
- When searching for a phrase, enter the words in the order they are most likely
to occur. The order of search words does not affect the scope of the search
results, but it will affect the order of their display.
Search Options
Frames (Outline view) or No frames (Full view)
- A finding aid searched from this "entire finding aid"
site (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/faid/faidquery.html)
will display as one document. Search results obtained using this page will
be organized by relevancy. An unframed finding aid is useful
for printing, or if a user encounters difficulty in using frames. A very
large finding aid displayed unframed will be slow to load.
- Selecting the "outline view" option takes you
to the primary search page (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/faid/faidquery.html.)
Finding aids searched from this site will be displayed using frames.
Frames have been selected as the default option for finding aids on the
search
page because of the highly contextual natre of these documents, which are
best understood when the table of contents is available on-screen at all
times.
The use of frames also permits large documents to be "chunked",
which allows the browser to retrieve only the portion of the finding aid
needed
at the time.
- Searches in the outline view operate differently than in the full text
view. In outline view, each section of a finding aid is considered a separate
document; searches retrieve each section which contains all the search terms
in a query. For example, a finding aid may contain both the terms "photograph"
and "alsop" -- but if these terms are not in the same section, an
outline view search will not return the document. The document will, however,
be retrieved in the full text view using the "Entire finding aid"
option, where the complete finding aid is searched as a single document.
Entire Document, Front Matter, or Container List
- All searches will run against the entire finding aid (Entire Document),
unless specified otherwise.
- If preferred, the search may be confined to the
title page and narrative parts of the finding aid, including Administrative
Information, Biographical Note/Agency History, Scope and Content Note, and
Description of Series (Front Matter), or to the detailed
list of contents (Container List).
Exact Search or Variant Words
- All searches will return results for variants of keywords
(such as plurals), unless the option "exact match only" is
selected.
Library of Congress Collections
- All searches will run against all collections at the
Library of Congress represented by finding aids encoded using Encoded
Archival Description (EAD), unless specified otherwise.
- To limit the search to a collections found in specific reading
rooms or research centers within the Library of Congress,
select from the following options: "Folklife Collections," "Geography
and Map Collections," "Manuscript Collections," "Performing
Arts Collections," "Prints and Photographs Collections," "Rare
Book Collections," and "Recorded Sound Collections." Only
one option may be selected at a time.
Note: The search engine used for the Finding Aids database
is currently licensed from Chiliad Publishing Incorporated. |
Interpreting
Search Results and Viewing Finding Aids | EAD
Finding Aids at the Library of Congress | EAD
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