BROWSE & SEARCH

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Advanced Search: Introduction

British Online Archives provides a powerful Advanced Search facility to help you find the information you require. This includes the ability to search all collections, even those for which you do not have licensed access.

Category

Each collection is assigned one or more of the broad subject categories in the drop-down menu. These allow you to browse collections related to the chosen subject, or they act as a filter in any keyword, phrase or date search. In addition to browsing all collections in a selected category, you may combine a category with any search keywords, phrases or parameters.

Keywords relating to the categories are also added, where possible, to the 'subject & keywords' field of each metadata record down to image level, and may therefore be used to help refine your search. The keywords are:

which you can use to limit the results of your search to a particular year or range of years.

Keywords & Phrases

You may use the four options either singly or in combination in order to refine your search using simple Boolean logic. The All of these terms box links search terms using the Boolean operator ‘AND’; Any of these terms uses the operator ‘OR’ to return results that contain at least one of chosen keywords; and None of these terms uses the operator ‘NOT’ (NB only works if one or more of the other boxes contain keywords). The Exact phrase box searches for exactly what you have specified, including any spaces or punctuation.

As with the Quick Search, the Advanced Search does not differentiate between letters in upper and lower case.

Date

Every collection contains metadata mentioning the period covered by the associated images, which you can use to limit the results of your search to a particular year or range of years.

Truncation

You can use an asterisk (*) to perform truncated keyword searches (e.g. 'histor*' will retrieve records containing any of 'historian', 'historians', 'historical', 'history' etc. (NB This feature does not work for Exact phrase or Date searches).

Filter Results

If you are logged in, either by IP address or by username and password, your search results are by default automatically filtered to include only collections whose images you are licensed to see. However, in Advanced Search, you can switch this optional filter off in order to retrieve results from all collections in the system, regardless of you are allowed to view the images or not.

Order Results

You can also choose to order the results by Collection ID or by title.