Help and User Guide
Some helpful tips for using the site efficiently.
Viewing Items
- Click on an item or its title to open the page associated with it.
- Hover your mouse over the larger view of the item (under Document Viewer) and select the pop-out button in the upper right hand corner, it looks like an arrow and a box. This opens the document in a new tab in a larger format.
- Once the new tab has opened, the magnifying glass in the upper right corner allows you to zoom in or out. Click on it and drag the slider bar (to the left of the magnifying glass) with the mouse to zoom in and out.
- You can use your mouse to scroll down through the pages of the document.
Searching the Site
The search feature at the top right of the screen is searching through the information associated with each item - title, description, date, etc.
Search settings can be adjusted for more relevant results:
- Keyword: similar to Google Search, a keyword search returns results ordered by relevance. Searching on "ancient warfare" will prioritize records that contain the full string "ancient warfare", but will also include records that contain the individual words "ancient" or "warfare".
- Boolean: allows greater fine-tuning than keyword search but does not return results by relevance. Do this by using certain characters at the beginning or end of words in the search string. Some examples:
+: a leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each row that is returned.
-: a leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the rows that are returned.
*: an appended asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator.
": a phrase that is enclosed within double quote characters matches only rows that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed. - Exact match: returns records that contain at least one match to the order of words entered, like "Civil War". Use this search type if you need to search short words, like "war", and the keyword/boolean searches do not produce results.
Searching Text within Individual Items
- Click on an item or its title to open the page associated with it.
- Hover your mouse over the larger view of the item (under Document Viewer) and select the pop-out button in the upper right hand corner, it looks like an arrow and a box. This opens the document in a new tab in a larger format.
- In order to search, press the "ctrl" button and the "f" button at the same time. A search box will appear in the upper right corner of the window and text can be searched. Note that you press "command (⌘) " and "f" simultaneously on a Mac computer.
- If the word or phrase appears multiple times in a document, click on the up and down arrows next to the search box to scroll through the results.
- Only newsletters are searchable at this time.