Entering your search term(s)

• Any number of search terms can be used.
• If you enter more than one search term choose the “AND” option to search for cards which include all of these terms, or “OR” to search for cards which include any of these terms.
• Phrase searching is not available, so it is not necessary to place quotation marks around phrases.
• Truncation searching is not available, so you can’t use a wildcard symbol like * or ? to find a term and its variant endings.

Too many hits, or hits are not accurate enough?

The search results are limited by default to 300 hits.  If your search has resulted in more than 300 hits, this will be indicated at the end of the list.

To make your search more accurate or precise, you could:

• Use more than one search term with the “AND” option
  For instance, a search for "Wight" produces lots of results, many not relevant, but if you search "Isle Wight" the results are more accurate.
• Adjust the fuzziness of your search upwards (see below)
• Use the Browse option instead
• Over-ride the default search limit (see below)
• Use a combination of search functions
  For example, adjust fuzziness value upwards plus over-ride search limit:
  "##9(100)agriculture" will search for cards with search term "agriculture" with similarity value 9 and search limit 100.

Too few hits, or not finding something expected?

To find more hits, you could:

• Use more than one search term with the “OR” option
  You can use this as a way of searching for synonyms or variant spelling.
• Adjust the fuzziness of your search downwards (see below)
  This may make it to possible to find a difficult to read card that the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) had problems with.
• Truncate the search term
  You can truncate the search term by preceding the truncated search term with "+".
  For example, "+agricul" will search for all terms beginning "agricul" with default similarity.
• Over-ride the default search limit (see below)

• Use a combination of search functions
  For example, adjust fuzziness value downwards plus over-ride search limit plus use truncation:
  "##5(2000)agricult" will search for cards with search term "agricult", similarity value 5, and search limit 2000.

How to over-ride the 300 hit limit

To over-ride the 300 limit, you could:

• Precede your search term with the number of results required in parentheses
  For example,
  "(2000)agriculture" will search for cards with the term "agriculture" with default similarity (7) and max. no of results 2000.
  or,
  "(100)agriculture" will search for cards with the term "agriculture" with default similarity (7) and max. no of results 100.
   

Adjusting the fuzziness of your search

The precision or fuzziness of a search can be adjusted.
Currently it is set to a default value of 7 where 1 would give you the widest set of results and 9 would give you the narrowest.
The default value of 7 can be overridden.
For instance, if you prefix your search with ##9 you will get fewer results or ##1 you will get more results.
Because of the way the fuzzy works using a higher value may exclude items which have the correct term on the card but the OCR has interpreted it incorrectly.

For example:
##9Engel - is the most precise search.
##7Engel - is the current setting and is the same as entering “Engel” only.
##6Engel - is less precise and may find extra relevant cards which have had your terms mis-read by the optical character recognition.
(Lower numbers can be used but are likely to give large numbers of cards that are not relevant.)

About Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The full text search has been enabled by a process called optical character recognition which looks at the groups of characters on the card image and converts the data into something that can be searched.
The fuzzy search means that even if the characters have not been correctly recognised the system can interpret the data and give you some results.
(If a whole book is being digitised the optical character recognition can be adjusted to allow for inconsistencies in the typeface e.g. an indistinct character, because it will occur throughout the document. Because our cards were typed and produced on many machines and by several methods this "learning" part of the OCR process cannot be used.)

The optical character recognition does not always recognise a word or term but the fuzzy search will display all near matches.