Search Guide

How to Search

How to Search

The Archives Hub provides a number of search options:

Quick search: the homepage provides a quick search box
Search: the main search page provides a quick search box and the ability to create more sophisticated searches
Subject Finder: gives you the option to find related subjects
Browse: provides a browse list

Quick Search

Go to the home page: www.archiveshub.ac.uk

Enter your search terms in the box provided and click on Go.
e.g. Keyword (default search): writers

The Home page search gives you a number of simple search options.

You can choose different search options by clicking on the drop down menu and selecting one of the following:

Keywords - searches all main fields, such as title, scope and content and index terms (subjects, names, etc.)
Titles - searches titles of collections and titles of lower-level descriptions (series, items)
Creators - searches names of creators of archives, both individuals and organisations (e.g. agatha christie, john ruskin, trades union congress)
Names - searches personal names, family names and corporate names
Subjects - searches subjects that have been assigned to descriptions, so usually indicates a collection is strong in this subject area

Use our main search page for the full range of search options.

Search

From our main search page you can choose any of the following search options:

Keywords - all main fields, such as title, scope and content and index terms (subjects, names, etc.)
Titles - titles of collections and titles of lower-level descriptions (series, items)
Dates - dates that the archives cover, i.e. dates they were created. Some archives range over centuries, others may span decades or just be individual dates
Creators - names of creators of archives, both individuals and organisations (e.g. agatha christie, john ruskin, trades union congress)
Ref. Numbers - reference numbers assigned to collections (requires knowledge of references used by repositories)
Subjects - subjects that have been assigned to descriptions. Usually indicates a collection is strong in this subject area.
Names - personal names, family names and corporate names
People - personal names
Organisations - corporate names
Places - place names
Media types - genre, such as photographs, glass negatives, manuscripts (only a small proportion of descriptions use this field)

Build Your Search

Repository Searching

The Hub searches across archives held at hundreds of repositories. You can choose to search within All repositories that contribute to the Hub or click on the drop down menu and select just a specific repository

All / Any / Phrase options

You may choose to refine your search by using the drop-down box to select 'All' search terms, 'Any' search terms or a 'Phrase' search. These boxes change slightly depending on your main search option. Some provide an 'Exact' search, and the date search provides other appropriate options.

Add another search term

Additional search terms can be added by clicking on the ...Add another search term link. This will add more search options which you can link with AND, OR, and NOT. You can add another search term as many times as needed to create more complex searches.

Only display collections

'Collections' refers to higher-level descriptions that give a summary of a collection of archives. Collection level descriptions and lower-level descriptions, which give more detail, will be displayed at the same time by default. If you only want to see an overview of collections, it is a good idea to select Only display collection descriptions by using the checkbox provided. If you want to see more detail then leave the checkbox unchecked.

Click on the Go button or press enter to run your search.

Click on Reset to empty the search boxes.

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Search Tips

Case sensitivity

The Archives Hub is not case sensitive. For example, you can search for Stanley Kubrick or stanley kubrick.

Phrase Searching

There are two ways to phrase search in the Archives Hub.

Use quotation marks around a phrase to search for terms when they appear together.
e.g. "graphic designers"
NB If you use quotations marks in the main search; make sure you only use this when you have selected 'All' or 'Any' from the drop-down list. If you use quotation marks in an 'Exactly' search, then you will search for your search terms with the quotation marks, which might mean you get 0 results.
Choose 'Phrase search' from the drop down list.
e.g. Phrase search: industrial revolution

Wildcards

Wildcard symbols are used to represent letters within words to search for word variations when you do not want to narrow down your search too far.

? represents a single letter

e.g. wom?n
searches for "woman" and "women"

* can be used at the end of the root of a word to search for different endings

e.g. photograph*
searches for photograph, photographs, photographer, photography

Browse

Browse allows you to browse alphabetically through the following options:

Title - name of the collection
Creator - creator of the archive, which may be an individual or organisation
Subject - subjects assigned to descriptions
Names - names assigned to descriptions, including individuals, families and organisations
People - individuals
Family - family names
Organisations - corporate names
Places - place names
Reference Numbers - reference numbers given to collections, including country code and repsitory code

For example, if you search for the subject Basque, you will see all of the subject terms that are alphabetically adjacent to this term, such as Basket Makers, Basque literature, Basque Poetry, Basques.

Subject finder

Use our subject search as way of finding archive material with related subject terms.
e.g. Writers
Your results include terms such as novels, letter writing, hymn writing, playwrights and literature.

The subject finder looks for other subject terms within the descriptions, and weights these in the list of results according to how commonly they are found with your search term.

Results Display

The Archives Hub results screen is split into two.
Brief records or hits are shown on the left hand side.
Search filter options are shown on the right hand side of the screen.
Once you have selected a result display option, this will be shown on the right hand side.
If the description includes a table of contents, this will display on the left hand side.

Summary record

Select Summary to see a summary version of the record:

View the summary display by clicking on 'Summary' or on the title of the record
Summary view includes the main descriptive fields (core information, scope and content, administrative history and index terms)
Summary excludes lower-level detail, such as series descriptions and item descriptions
Summary includes highlighting of your search term

Highlighted search terms

You may use wildcards within your search term. These are applicable when searching for words, phrases and exact terms, but NOT dates. If you wish to use any of these wildcard characters literally (i.e. meaning that character), you must escape it using the backslash (\) character.
N.B.: While it is possible to use a wildcard as the first character of a term, this is inadvisable as this drastically increases the search response time in the current implementation.
Available wildcard characters and their meanings are listed below:

A single asterisk (*) matches zero or more characters. This is particularly useful for end truncation of subjects etc, but can also be used in the middle of terms. Examples:
- will match records with subjects: "coal mines", "coal miners", "coal mining", "coal mining, great britain, wales" etc.
- will match records with titles: "the john smith archive", "the national coal mining archive" etc.
A single question mark (?) matches a single character. This is particularly useful when searching for words, or names, you know can have variant spellings. Examples:
- will match records with keywords: "colonisation", "colonization" etc.
- will match records with personal names: "smith", "smyth" etc.
Of course, these wildcards can be combined and they will work as one would imagine:
- will match records with personal names: "smith", "smyth", "smithson", "smythley" etc.

Email

Select Email to send a plain-text version of the full record to an email address that you provide.

Accessing archives

The Archives Hub does not hold any archival material. We simply provide an online catalogue of material held by our contributors. You will need to contact our contributors if you want to access any materials described on the Hub.

All of the finding aids in the Hub include contact details for the relevant repository. To find this contact information, you need click on the link to the name of the repository.

e.g. Held at: University of the Arts London. University Archives & Special Collections Centre

You will link to contact information from the National Archives' ARCHON service.

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