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
• If you tick the Truncate option the search will look for your search term and its variant endings, eg history and historical for ‘histor’.  If you use Truncate, the similarity is fixed.

Too many hits, or hits are not accurate enough?

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 similarity (fuzziness) of your search upwards (see below).
• Use the Browse option instead.

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.
• Use the Truncate option.
• Adjust the similarity (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.

Adjusting the similarity (fuzziness) of your search

The precision or fuzziness of a search can be adjusted by changing the similarity. Currently it is set to a default value of 90% but  you can change this with the following results:

• 100% - is the most precise search. Because of the way the fuzzy search works using a higher value may exclude items which have the correct term on the card but the OCR has interpreted it incorrectly.
• 90% - is the default setting.
• 80% - is less precise and may find extra relevant cards which have had your terms mis-read by the optical character recognition.
• 50% - is the lowest setting and is likely to give large numbers of cards which 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 scanned 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.