Using the Archives Catalogue

How do I search the archive catalogue?

How do I search for a Reference Number (Ref No)?

How do I narrow my search?

How do I search for people?

How do I search for places and subjects?

What if I have a specific date or time period in mind?

Are there other ways to search?

How do I search the archive catalogue?

Using the quick search on the home page search for a word or phrase. This will search across the Title and Description and other textual fields in the record. The quick search does not search on the Reference Number field.

How do I search for a Reference Number (Ref No)

Use the Advanced Search link at the top of the page and search using the RefNo field.

How do I narrow my search?

You can use many of the Advanced Search options to narrow down your search. You can search on a particular level, you can choose to search using a range of dates, or you can add another word to your search.

How do I search for people?

The easiest way to search for people is to use the quick search on the home page of the archives catalogue. This will search for the name in a number of textual fields in the record.

If you want to do a more targeted search for people, you can use the name authority - an index to standard forms of names used in the catalogue. You can search the name authority index using the People Search link at the top of the page.

How do I search for places and subjects?

At present, our online catalogue does not use place and subject indexes. Please search for place names (countries, cities, towns, geographical features etc) using the quick aearch or advanced search Any text field.

What if I have a specific date or time period in mind?

You can use the date field in the Advanced Search. You can enter an individual year, a span of years, and you can even enter terms such as early, mid and late. Some dates are entered using the prefix c (circa), and some dates are entered as undated or n.d. (no date).

Are there other ways to search?

Yes, other options are available to help you in your searching. These give a range of flexible ways to manipulate your results:

1. Searching on levels

In the advanced search, you can use the drop down menu for the Level field to restrict your search to parts of the catalogue rather than all of it. This type of search will search across collections, at the same hierarchical level. You may wish to find out all the mentions of a particular person at file level for example, or just look at all the descriptions of collections (fonds).

• Fonds is the highest level of description, and describes the whole of a collection.
• Sub-fonds may represent a departmental structure or subject arrangement of an individual's papers.
• Series and sub-series are the level where runs of minutes, series of files etc are described.
• File describes a physical folder or unit, such as an individual minute book, an envelope of notes, a diary or a bundle of letters.
• Item level is for individual items such as a single letter.
• Collection refers to a collection of photographs.
• Image is for individual photographs, within the Photographic Collection (PH).

2. Searching on Finding number

If you know the specific code for the collection (the Finding No.), you can use this to limit your search, for example searching for DF406 will restrict your search to the Keeper of Botany's subject files.

3. Truncation

You can search for parts of words using truncation. For example, map* will then search for maps, mapping etc. * can be used at the beginning or end of words, and in the middle. If you place * in a field, it will return all records where there is text in that field.

4. Using Word and Field options

You can use these options when you want to enter more than one word in a search field. Selecting And gives you records containing one word and the other, Or gives you one word or the other. 'Phrase' gives you the words in the given order.