Tag Archives: effective searching

Request a Particular Box within a Collection

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Some­times, researchers who have vis­ited before know exactly which box within a col­lec­tion they want to see. They may pre­fer to search for that box rather than look­ing through the whole find­ing aid to find it.

Luck­ily, there’s a very easy way to do this. Once you’re in the find­ing aid for the col­lec­tion that you want to see, search for “Box X” (with X, of course, being the box num­ber you’re look­ing for).

Search for a box within a collection. Be sure to surround your search with quotation marks.

Search for a box within a col­lec­tion. Be sure to sur­round your search with quo­ta­tion marks.

And the results of your search will return records con­tained in the box you specified.

Here, you see records that are in box 135 of the Harold Medina papers.

Here, you see records that are in box 135 of the Harold Med­ina papers.

And to request these items, click on the title to go to the entry in the find­ing aid and click the but­ton that says “Request this Box.”

As always, don’t hes­i­tate to call or email us if you have ques­tions about this process.

Effective Searching

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When search­ing, it’s good to keep a few things in mind.

  1. Try lots of dif­fer­ent terms. “Sylvia Beach let­ters” will pro­duce dif­fer­ent results than “Sylvia Beach correspondence”.
  2. The more words you use in your search, the fewer results will come back to you. “Woodrow Wil­son” will pro­duce fewer results than “Wil­son”, but not all of the Wilsons that are pro­duced may be about Woodrow.
  3. Using a minus sign (-) will exclude a term from results. If you’re inter­ested in Ray Stan­nard Baker, but you keep get­ting results for James A. Baker III, a good search might be “Ray Baker –James”.

Narrowing Search Results

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There are two ways of nar­row­ing search results on this site.

First, more search terms will result in fewer results. Notice that the orig­i­nal search term is already in the box — sim­ply add more terms to get more pre­cise results.
If you know that there’s a term that you def­i­nitely don’t want to see results for, just put a minus sign ( — ) in front of it. For instance, if you were inter­ested in the his­tory of women at Prince­ton, but you didn’t want results related to coed­u­ca­tion, sim­ply enter “women Prince­ton –coed­u­ca­tion”.
Sec­ond, you can use the terms on the left of the screen to nar­row down your results to entire cat­e­gories of content.

Advanced tips:
Archival col­lec­tions are orga­nized by who col­lected the mate­ri­als, not what the mate­ri­als are about. You may be pleas­antly sur­prised by search­ing out­side of the col­lec­tions that you think an item should be in.
Results in the “name,” “genre,” and “sub­ject” facets can be thought of as tags — if an item has been tagged with any of the terms in the list, it will appear in the revised results. But some rel­e­vant results may not have been tagged — nar­row­ing this way may result in miss­ing good material!