Constructing Finding Aid Searches

This search screen includes options for "simple" keyword searches on a word or words.

Search for Word or Phrase

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.

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.

Finding aids searched from this site (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/faid/faidfrquery.html) 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 nature 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.
If the "entire finding aid" option is selected, another version of the search page will be displayed (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/faid/faidquery.html.) Search results obtained using this page will be organized by relevancy, and each finding aid will display as one document.
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.

All searches will run against sections of the Entire Finding Aid 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). All finding aids consist of at least two sections, Front Matter, and Container List. In longer finding aids, each series in a Container List will be a separate section against which searches are run.

All searches will return results for variants of keywords (such as plurals), unless the option "exact match only" is selected.

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.

Search results listing the sections of the finding aid in which search terms were found will be ordered by relevancy, unless the "finding aid" button is selected; note that different sections of the same finding aid may be listed separately based on their individual relevancy.

If the "finding aid" button is selected, all portions of a given finding aid in which the search term was found will be listed together. Note that the order of the list is based on finding aid identifier number, and results will not be listed in order of relevancy.

Note: The search engine used for the Finding Aids database is currently licensed from Chiliad Publishing Incorporated.