General Tips Back to Top
 

This advice will help you improve your results when using the full text search:

1. Use at least two or three search terms. By using more search terms to narrow your search, you can locate documents that fit your information needs better.

2. Be specific. When looking for documents about the Purple Cross, enter both of those words in your search query. If you enter just Cross, your search may give you items concerning decorations or the Red Cross in general.

3. Find an exact phrase with the help of the PRE operator. You can narrow your searches by requiring that the search terms appear as a phrase in the order that you typed them. For example, when looking for works that discuss prisoners of war, search for these words as a phrase, prisoners PRE/2 war. (It literally means find prisoners "preceding within 2 characters or character spaces of" war.) This narrows the results from hundreds of matches to a few dozen matches, assuming the phrase typed is not too common.

4. Mix phrases and single search terms in the search box. For example, enter "prisoners of war" AND fund.

5. Broaden your search by using the OR operator. For example, "Royal Air Force" OR RAF. Unless you tell the search engine otherwise, it finds only those works containing all of the words specified. By using OR between search words, terms, or phrases, you’ll find works that contain as few as one of the requested words. Using the OR operator will increase the number of results that are found; use OR if the search isn’t finding enough works.

6. Use plural or other word endings. For example, when looking for information on nurses, search for various forms of the word using the OR operator as the connector, e.g. nurse or nurses or nursing. It is also possible, depending on the desired search term, to use the truncation (or wildcard) feature to retrieve multiple forms of a word, e.g., nurs*.

7. Try using synonyms for your original words. For example, enter "field hospital" or "military hospital".

8. Check your spelling. If you type hopital instead of hospital, your search won’t find any matches, unless you have activated some level of fuzzy searching.

Please Note: The main captions are based on an inventory compiled from the original index created by the founders from 1917 to 1926, and from individual captions created by many individual compilers or donors. Although every effort has been made to illiminate discrepancies and correct errors some will inevitably remain and the inherent organisation of the collection remains true to the original.

Capitalization Back to Top
 

The search engine is not case sensitive. That is, use of capitalization does not affect the results of a search.

Punctuation Back to Top
 

Hyphen. A hyphen (-) used between two words is considered part of the term. When searching for a word or phrase that normally contains a hyphen, include the hyphen:

·         "sub-committee"

Ampersand. Ampersands (&) are not recognized by the search engine. Use the W (Within) proximity operator. (See Search Operators below to learn more about proximity operators.)

·         suffrage W/2 politics (means "suffrage within two words of politics"; instead of suffrage & politics)

Diacritics Back to Top

Women, War & Society, 1914-1918 supports searching on and display of diacritics--letters that include phonetic markings, e.g., á, ô, ü, etc.--and special characters such as Æ and ø, which often occur in foreign-language terms and names.

Searching on a term that includes a diacritic, such as "crèche", will return results matching both "crèche" and "creche". Likewise, a search on "creche" will return results matching both "creche" and "crèche".

Diacritics can be included in a search term or phrase by either copying and pasting a term containing a diacritic into the search term box, or by typing the diacritic using special combinations of keys on a standard keyboard. A useful document that provides information on using a standard keyboard to produce diacritics and other special characters, Typing Accents and Special Characters, is available online from Pennsylvania State University.

Truncation (Wildcard) Characters Back to Top
 

The * (asterisk) and ? (question mark) are used to search for words or numbers sharing a similar pattern. 

The * and ? replace alphabetical and numerical characters.

The * (standing for any number of characters) is placed at the end of the term’s root. The search retrieves all words sharing the same root. For example, the term suffrag* retrieves items that contain the words suffrage, suffragist, suffragists, suffragette or suffragettes.

The ? is used to replace exactly one character within a word to retrieve various forms of that word. For example, the term wom?n retrieves works that contain either woman or women; and wo??n matches women, woman or woven.

Date Ranges Back to Top
 

A date range is used to search for multiple years in date fields.

·         1914-1916 (to search for any year from 1914 through 1916)

Search Operators Back to Top
 

The Boolean search operators AND, OR, NOT, and proximity operators may be used to refine your search. Whether the operators are typed in uppercase or lowercase does not affect the search. Please note, however, that if an operator appears in a string of words you are searching for, such as Maternity and Child Welfare, it will still be interpreted as a search operator. This may lead to irrelevant results. If you are searching for a string that contains a search operator, enclose the string in quotation marks.

AND. Use the AND search operator to retrieve documents that contain both of the specified search terms. This operator places no condition on where the terms are found in relation to one another; however, both terms have to appear somewhere in the field you are searching. For example, a full text search for battle AND hospital will find any document that contains mention both of battles and hospitals.

OR. Use the OR search operator to retrieve documents that contain one or both specified search terms. This operator places no condition on where the terms are found in relation to one another; however, one or both terms must appear somewhere in the field you are searching. For example, a full text search for battle OR hospital will find documents that mention battles, documents that mention hospitals, and documents that mention both.

NOT. Use the NOT search operator to retrieve documents that do not contain the specified term. For example, a full text search for battle NOT hospital will find items that mention battles but not hospitals.

PARENTHESES. The operators described above each operate on either simple terms (words or phrases) or a more complex query delimited by parentheses ( ). Parentheses allow you to construct very powerful queries. For example:

·         "military hospital" AND ((nurse and women) OR nursing)

Boolean operators are applied in the order in which they appear. Therefore, the following searches are equivalent:

·         battle AND hospital OR nurse

·         (battle AND hospital) OR nurse

Proximity Back to Top
 

The proximity operators PRE (Preceding) and W (within) may be used to refine your search:

·         The PRE operator will find documents containing the specified words in the specified order within the number of characters you indicate. For example, munitions pre/4 factory finds documents that contain the word munitions preceding the word factory within four characters or character spaces. This function can be vital in returning accurate results from typed or handwritten documents, which can often present irregularities of character spacing.

·         The W operator will find documents containing the specified words in any order within the number of words you indicate. For example, munitions w/4 factory finds documents that contain the word munitions within four words of the word factory, regardless of their order (that is, factory could precede or follow munitions).

Field Length Back to Top
 

The length of any given field is not limited to the window you see on the screen. As a search term or terms is keyed, the text will continue to scroll to the left, so that you can see the search expression as it is being keyed.

Stopwords Back to Top