The following tips and suggestions can help you get the results you are looking for when browsing the Digital Collection.
Basic Browsing and Searching
Some images are accompanied by Hamnet records which describe the entire item, not the specific portion photographed. In most cases only abbreviated data records are provided.
A search by keyword is often the best place to start.
Also, although Browser Insight will show you only 20 thumbnails at a time, if you download and install Luna Insight, you can browse through up to 250 thumbnails at a time by changing the number in "collection paging size" in the bottom right corner of the screen. Thumbnail browsing can be a great way to explore our content without having to enter search terms.
Searching by Keyword
A keyword search finds terms anywhere within the information that accompanies an image .
Here are some tips:
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all letters must be lower case
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the search finds exactly the term you type in the box
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include any hyphens in the name or term
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do not enter any punctuation except for hyphens. Use a blank where punctuation appears. For O'Brien, use o brien
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you can truncate a term by using * before or after a fragment of the term
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keyword searches work best if you use as few words as possible.
Searching with Multiple Keywords
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Choose search, by data fields and select the (PDI) field you want to search in
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Select contains and enter your keyword
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Select or to expand your search to include results with the same keyword in a different field, or to add to your search other keywords that might be present in other fields
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Select and to narrow your search to include only results with all the keywords you enter
Excluding Images from your Search Results
Want to search for Shakespeare-related images, but exclude most images of printed pages?
Here’s a tip: since many of the books we have digitized are Shakespeare Quartos and Folios, add a “does not contain” criteria to a search by data fields.
Here’s how:
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Choose search, by data fields and select the (PDI) field you want to search in
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Select contains and enter your keyword
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Select and, select Shelfmark (PDI), select does not contain, and enter “STC” (which will exclude items printed in Great Britain before 1641)
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Click search
Two things to remember: this search would still retrieve images of items printed after 1640, and images of manuscripts; and you may end up missing images that originally appeared in English printed books before 1641.
For more tips and techniques, see our "How-to" page.
