Finding aids can be searched on one or two separate keywords using boolean and/or/not operators either within specific EAD metadata fields or across the entire findingaid. You may also use phrases of up to three words as a keyword phrase.

Your query will retrieve a list of finding aids that meet your search criteria. The results are with one exception sorted according to relevance scoring -- from the finding aid with the most hits to the one with the fewest. Select a finding aid to view and click on the link.

There is an additional search resource available for Print Room Finding Aid search in the form of an item-level catalogued Union catalog of some 30 databases. Here you may undertake a more fine-grained search to supplement your search over the text of the Finding Aid.

An experimental XSLT-based search within the finding aid has been replaced by one using javascript. You may search on a single word or a short phrase. This search is not case sensitive. A search on a word is wildcarded on both ends: if you search on nation the script will highlight ratiocination and nationality. To avoid this feature simply add an empty space to either end of the term.

Oracle InterMedia Text uses an inverse frequency relevancy ranking algorithm based on Salton's formula. Inverse frequency ranking assumes that frequently occurring terms in a document set are noise terms, and are thus scored lower. For a document to score high the query term must occur frequently in the document but infrequently in the document set as a whole.

For instance, if a document set contains 5 documents, and only one document contains the term, a term must occur 20 times in a document for that document to score 100%. If there are 10 documents in the set, a document must contain 17 instances of the term to score 100%.

You may perform a proximity search on any two keywords within the entire text or within a single field. The former search is more fruitful.

The theme search scours a theme-based thesaurus to pull up entries with concepts related to the search term, e.g. an entry containing the word "military" would satisfy a search about war.

Be aware that searching is not case sensitive.

Words such as "and", "the", or "of" have been designated stopwords, and will not be searched.

Keyword phrases may contain up to three words, or four words if one is a stopword such as "of".

Keywords are by default wildcarded at the end to allow for a broader return in cases such as plural forms. You can use this to advantage by truncating your search term to a point where the wildcard can fill in inflectional or plural endings and so on to cut a wider swath through the database.

In order to winnow out unwanted entries, try adding a space before and/or after your search term.

Full dates should be in the format YYYY-MM-DD.