EVE Online Catalogue

Tips for searching the catalogue

1. Opening the catalogue and finding the main search form

Go to the catalogue home page at http://billdouglas.ex.ac.uk/eve
Click on the tab marked ‘Search the catalogue’.
You are now ready to search the database. However, before you start, read Section 2 to learn about the types of search available, and then Sections 3 and 4 for step-by-step instructions on searching. Section 5 provides hints to help you with your searches.

2. Most useful search criteria

The most useful searches available to you will probably be the general search, ‘Search by Person’, and ‘Search by Production’. In practice, the more precise and complex a request, the less likely it is to find material – as a general rule, it is better to keep your request simple and browse through a range of records than to be over-precise and find none at all.
Six important types of information form the main ways of identifying items in the catalogue:

Title. Either the published title found on the item, or a short description allocated by the catalogue – ‘what it is called’.

Type of object. A short description of the physical nature of the object (‘handbill’, ‘optical toy’, ‘book’ etc.) – that is, ‘what it is’.

Broad subject terms. A rough indication of the content or subject matter of the object, or the subject that gives it its relevance to the collections – ‘what it is about’.

Description. This is a general description of the item or, if it is a book, of its subject matter.

Person. This search is largely for locating items by author, editor etc. It will not always be useful as a subject search, because not all of the records have the relevant information. If you are looking for items related to a particular person it is better to enter their name in the general search.

Production. This search allows you to search by specific film, play or TV programme titles. When using the production search you need to remember that an exact phrase from the title must be entered.

The first four of these are searched for within the general search box that appears on the front page. Words entered into this search box will be searched for across all four fields, so expanding the number of records that will be returned to you. If your search criteria are too general, you may find that this runs to several thousand records – if so, you can add in extra words to refine your criteria.

If you already know what you are looking for (a particular book, for instance) it may be quicker or easier to search for distinctive words in the title, or for the author’s surname in the Person search.

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3. Beginning your search

3.1. Searching using the general description option (default setting on the drop-down menu)

This search works like a Google search – i.e. if you enter several words, all the records will be listed that contain all those words, regardless of whether they are next to each other in the text. So, for instance, if you type ‘John Ford’ into this box, the search results will include not only items that relate to John Ford but also those that relate to, say, both John Wayne and Harrison Ford. If you want to limit your search to John Ford you can put quotation marks around the words, so that the search will only run on that exact phrase.

For this example we’re going to enter ‘magic lantern’ into the search box. You do not have to worry about using capitals or lower case – the search does not distinguish between the two. Once you have entered the text for which you want to search, click on ‘Go’.

This search looks through four different fields in the database – the title, the type of object, the broad subject type and the description. It is set to a default weighting which favours title and description over object and subject types. You can change the weighting by clicking on the ‘Advanced search options’ link. This will bring up a modified Search page, where you can adjust how important the different fields are for your search. Setting the value at 10 will make the field very important; setting the value at 0 will mean that that field will be ignored in the search.

3.2. Searching using the Other Searches

The drop-down menu to the right of the search box also offers you other searches. These include ‘by person (surname)', 'by production', 'by series', 'as an item number' and 'images only'. Searching on a person is useful for finding authors, directors, composers and the like, and will sometimes pick up subjects as well. The production search allows you to search for a film, play or TV programme related to items on the database. The series search is mostly used for searching for periodicals. 'As an item number' allows you to return easily to a specific item in the collection if you know its item number already. The image search carries out a general search, but confines the search to those items that have images on the database.

The basic method of searching works in the same way as the general search, but remember to select the relevant search from the drop-down menu. Try doing this with a surname such as 'Monroe' or 'Chaplin' to see the kind of results generated.

You can also search on an alphabetical index, if you select the 'A-Z indexes' link. This will take you to a set of alphabetical lists for the person, production and series searches. Select any letter in the 'associated person' index and you will bring up a list of all the people whose surnames begin with that letter. Clicking on a particular person will automatically carry out a search on that person for you.

These searches work in exactly the same way if you try ‘By production’ or ‘By series title’. When you are searching by these methods, however, you must enter the exact phrase you require. So, ‘Wizard Oz’ will not find you items on ‘The Wizard of Oz’ but ‘Wizard of Oz’ or ‘Oz’ will.

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4. Obtaining information from the results of your search

Once the computer has completed the search it will display a results page. If there were no results for your search you will be told that this is the case, and will be offered a new search. You may want to check that your typing was correct the first time round.

The first column holds the picture of the item, if there is one on the database. The second column gives the title (with the item number in brackets - you will need this for requesting the item for research use) and below that any information that is in the description field. The third and fourth columns provide you with information on the type of object and broad subject terms. The results of a ‘series title’ search will also list the volume or set number, the issue number and the issue date, instead of the main description. The search words that you used will be shown in bold in the details.

You can move up and down the list of items by using the scrollbar on the right-hand side of the window.

If you decide that you do not want to look at any further details, you can make a new search simply by entering a new set of words into the search box.

If you are interested in seeing the details for a particular item, click on the title. This will take you to a second screen, which displays the brief details for that item alone, with a slightly larger image (if there is one). In the bottom left-hand corner of this screen you can click on ‘Show full record’ to see further details.

The full database record will provide you with all the information that is available to researchers. There may not be a large amount of information – many of the records only have a brief inventory, but further information will be provided as the cataloguing progresses.

You can go back to the list of items produced by your search by clicking twice on the back arrow on your browser. Alternatively, you can make a new search simply by using the box at the bottom of the page. (NB. this is only true for general searches; for the other searches you will need to click on the ‘Search the BDC tab’ at the top of the page, to return to the main search page.

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5. Hints for Searching

In the general search and the person search the computer will only search for whole words. If you can’t remember exactly how to spell a name try different variants of it to bring up all the possible results. The production search and series title search allowing searching by parts of words.

Your searches will be more successful if you can think laterally and try several different approaches. For example, if you are looking for materials on Swedish films, search for both Sweden and Swedish, but also consider searching for Scandinavia and Stockholm, and so on. You could also try searches for any notable Swedish personalities you can think of who might be relevant (Bergman, Garbo, etc.), or for phrases from the titles of relevant films.

In searching, the database does not distinguish between upper- and lower-case characters – so a search for brando is identical to one for Brando.

Words that would normally contain accented characters, such as Lumière, will not appear with accents in the results, and the accents should not be included when you are searching.

You may find that more than one record appears in your search results with the same information – that is, only the Item number changes as you move from one record to the next. There is a certain amount of duplication within the collections, although in many cases there are small differences between items, which may or may not be significant (different editions of the same book, items described in the same way which are in fact physically different, etc.). These differences will not always be apparent from the catalogue, especially in the book collections, until the cataloguing process is more complete than at present.

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