Search Procedures

19th Century Masterfile uses a relevancy-ranking search engine to retrieve and display the results of search requests.

The search engine evaluates "relevance" not only by the number of occurrences of the search words within each record but also on the basis of the proximity of the search words to one another and on the significance of the fields within which the words are found.

Searching:

To initiate a search, enter one or more words into the Word Search field and click the SEARCH button. The best search strategy, generally speaking, is to enter a word or short phrase (e.g., death, taxes).

Alternately, you may wish to type in one or more terms that are commonly associated with the subject. A single term, if it is not too common, frequently will produce good search results.

Searches also can be narrowed by restricting the word search to exact word matches, limiting the search to items in a specific database.

For example, records where all of the search words appear in the title are given greater weight than those where all of the search words appear in other fields in the record.

19th Century Masterfile bibliographic records and full text links

The indices contained here are, for the most part, subject indices. Most of the data one would associate with a full bibliographic record is not present in the original.

However, Paratext is adding important bibliographic data (e.g., the inclusion of date and full title information into this electronic edition of Poole's Index), as well as "converting" the index data into MARC-like form. This permits more choices in searching criteria for the researcher.

Information on the current contents of 19th Century Masterfile is available by visiting here.

In Series IV: Individual Title Indices of 19th Century Masterfile we have added full text links to the citations from Harper's Magazine Index, Atlantic Monthly, North American Review. More titles are added to this regularly.

Access to the records within this database is provided via two separate information retrieval mechanisms, a Search function and a Browse function:

Search and Browse

• The Search function allows you to perform full text searches of the indexed data.
• The Browse function provides you with the ability to browse journals (periodicals and author) or a broader KEYWORD search.

    Several qualifiers are provided for customizing the method used to perform the word search. In that regard:

• The word search, by default, includes both singular and plural forms of the search words entered. The word search can be made narrower by limiting the search to the exact words as entered, or to the exact phrase as entered. Alternately, the word search can be made broader by including word variants generated by a word stemmer and a table of synonyms.
  
• In addition, the word search defaults to selecting records containing all of the words specified in the word search field. The number of records selected can be increased by clicking on the option to select records containing any of the words.
  
• Finally, the word search defaults to searching all of the text fields included in the records. However, it also can be directed to search one specific field. The number of searchable fields separately searchable in 19th Century Masterfile will expand as more data sources are added.

    Common words such as "a", "an", and "the" are included on a "stop word" list supplied to the search engine. Such words are ignored whenever a word search is performed. Also, to optimize performance, the maximum number of records that will be retrieved in a search defaults to 1000.


Search Results Displays

    The results of a search are first presented in the brief format, which provides a short list of matching records with up to 20 items per display page. The title of the item, its publication date, author, and other information (if available) is displayed and the results are presented in relevance order as determined by the search engine. Click on the hypertext link on the brief display to view the full display for that item. The total number of items found by the search is shown at the top of the display.

    Navigation through a multi-page results set is supported by NEXT PAGE and PREVIOUS PAGE buttons. Additional buttons are provided for initiating a new search, modifying a search, resequencing the records in the set, and for selectively saving a subset of the records in a new results set.

    The full display shows the essential bibliographic record for one item.