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How to Search the USFSP Digital Archive
By Carol Hixson, DeanNelson Poynter Memorial Library
May 31, 2014
Many ways to search
• Use a search box to search a word or phrase• Use a Browse index to browse through lists of
authors, titles, subjects, and more• Search the entire archive• Search a section of the archive• Use the Advanced Search option• Search through the Internet
What is searched?
• All words in a file– Word documents, PDFs, Text files, PowerPoint
presentations, etc.• A program runs nightly to create full-text indexes of all
files added to the archive that day
• All words used to describe a file– These words are indexed as soon as the item is
added to the archive
Search DSpace and Search USFSP’s Digital Archive both search the entire archive
Browse fixed indexes for entirearchive
Opens up Advanced Search boxes
A word search across the entire archive retrieves every item where the search term appears somewhere in a file
What do the different sorts mean?
• Relevance: items where the search term occurs more frequently will appear first
• Issue date: the date that an item was created or presented (such as a publication date or date of a presentation)
• Title: the title of the item in the archive• Submit date: the date that the item was added to the archive
(which is usually different from the Issue date)• Descending: shows the most recent date first; or shows titles
beginning with the last letter of the alphabet first• Ascending: shows the oldest date first; or shows titles
beginning with the first letter of the alphabet first
Phrase searching
• Searching a phrase without quotation marks will find any file that has any of the words appearing anywhere in the item. Files that contain more of the words somewhere will appear closer to the top of the list, if the list is sorted by relevance
• Searching a phrase with quotation marks will find only files that have all of the words in the same order somewhere in the item
Phrase searching without quotation marks (smoking on campus) – means that all of the search words appear somewhere in the
listed items, but not necessarily together: 230 hits
Phrase searching with quotation marks (“smoking on campus”) – means that the entire phrase must appear
together somewhere in the listed items: 6 hits
Searching within a community or collection
• Every community and collection page has a search box that only searches that section of the archive
• It is also possible to limit searches to the community or collection by selecting from those options on the right-hand side of the page
Searching within a community or collection – search box appears right below the name
Or you can select ThisCollectionon right
Browse by Title: Sort by Ascending displays from the start of the alphabet; Descending displays from the end of the alphabet
Titles
• The archive ignores an article (the, a, an) in English-language titles if it occurs as the first word in the title• No words are ignored for titles in
other languages
Browse by Author: Sort by Ascending is from the start of the alphabet, Descending is from the end of the alphabet
Authors
• Authors’ names are assigned based on the way they appear in the materials being added to the archive. They appear Last name, First name
• A name with a period will index differently from a name without a period – what looks to be the same name may appear twice in the index display and will retrieve different items if one has a period at the end and the other doesn’t
• There are no cross references from one form of an author’s name to another but the Library tries to put all entries for the same person under the same form
You can jump to another part of a Browse index by clicking on the letter of the alphabet or by entering
letters or a complete name in the search box
Subjects
• Subjects are freely assigned by whoever puts an item in the archive
• Most items have not had subjects assigned
• Full-text indexing of all PDFs, documents, and presentations makes the addition of subject terms less necessary
Browse by Subject: Because all items are full-text searchable, most items in the archive have not had subjects assigned. A subject
search will retrieve only a small portion of what’s in the archive
Search a section of the archive
• Use the list of communities and collections to find a general area of interest
• Within that area, you can search for specific words or phrases
• This can help reduce the number of hits that are not directly related
• If you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can go back to searching the whole archive
Because the archive is registered with Google and other search engines, you can search through the Internet and find materials that are in the Digital Archive
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