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Basic search

File:Um4-1SearchBox.png

Enter a term in the Search box

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Search results screen

Use the Search box to find records in ICA-AtoM that contain text matching any keyword or phase. The Search box is available on every screen for every user.

1. Enter search text in the Search box.

2. Click the Search button.

3. ICA-AtoM searches all fields in all archival descripitons and returns matches on a Search results screen (list). This shows:

• The number of descriptions found.
• For each match, the description title and the first three lines of the "Scope and content" field.

4. Click a title to view the full description (routes you to the record's View screen).

Limitations:

• You can only search archival descriptions; you cannot currently search authority records, archival institutions, or terms.

• You cannot save the search results.

• There is no Advanced search screen. But see below for advanced search techniques that can be used in the basic Search box.

Future releases of ICA-AtoM (post-1.0) will address these limitations.

Advanced search

ICA-AtoM uses the Zend framework's implementation of the the Lucene search engine. This provides a number of options for advanced searching from within the Search box. For a full description of the features Zend's Lucene search supports, see:

• Zend Programmers Reference Guide, chapter 33.4: Zend_search_Lucene > Query language.

What follows is a selection of some of the most commonly used tools.

Phrases

• Use double quotes ("searchTerm") to search phrases.

• E.g. Search "city hall" to return records containing these two words together in that exact order.

Boolean operators

• Use AND to combine search terms to narrow your search: e.g. search vancouver AND "city hall" to return only descriptions that contain both search terms.

• Use OR to to combine search terms to broaden your search: e.g. search vancouver OR "city hall" to return descriptions that contain either search term.

• Use NOT to exclude terms: e.g. search vancouver NOT "city hall" to return descriptions that include vancouver but do not contain the phase "city hall".

• Boolean operators can be upper- or lowercase.

• You can substitute symbols for words: && (AND), || (OR), ! (NOT).

• Other Boolean operators are available; see Zend's documentation.

Fields

• You can restrict your search to specific fields by typing the field name followed by a colon ( : ) and the search text (fieldName:searchText).

• E.g. search title:city to return descriptions which include the word city in the title.

• You must enter the exact field name. These are not always intuitive nor do they necessarily correspond to the field label that appears on screen.

• For the list of searchable fields and their names, see in this manual: Field names for advanced searching.

Last revised: 4 June 2008 (ICA-AtoM v0.6)