Using the marc-e collection

This page contains help for the current collection. For general library help, please see the library help page. For more information about the Greenstone software, please see the About Greenstone page.

You can find your way to documents via 'browsing' or 'searching'. Browsing involves navigating through predefined categories and subcategories, or alphabetical lists. Searching will present you with a list of documents containing the specified terms in the selected text/metadata fields.

Help with Browsing

Browsing is pretty straightforward. Select the appropriate tab underneath the collection header to browse by that field. The browsing structures may be organised alphabetically or into categories and subcategories.

This bookshelf icon indicates a new category or subcategory of the browsing structure. Clicking on this bookshelf icon or the icon will open up that part of the browsing structure.

 

These 'book' icons indicate you have reached a document. Clicking these will take you to an HTML version of the document, or a page describing the document. indicates a structured document, while indicates a single page document.

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These 'source' icons indicate a link to the original version of the document, e.g. PDF, Word, MP3 etc.

Help with Searching

On every page is a quick search form. Enter your search terms, select which index you are searching (if there is a choice) and hit 'search'. Indicate phrases using double quotes around the phrase, e.g. "snail farming". All the default search settings will be used. Results are split into pages - use the next/prev arrows to navigate through the pages of search results.

If you want more control over your search settings you can use one of the alternate search forms listed underneath the quick search form.

Text Search

The text search form gives you the same single field search as the quick search form, however you can control more search parameters. These depend on the indexing tool that the collection has been built with, but may include whether you are searching for some or all of the search terms; searching at document or chapter level; casefolding and stemming; which order to sort search results; how many hits per page of search results etc.

Fielded Search

The form search gives you the ability to search for words in different fields. For example, 'BOSTID' in Organisations, and 'economic future' in Titles. Other search parameters are set across all the search items.

Advanced Search

The advanced form search gives you even more precision, allowing boolean combination between terms in different fields. For example, 'BOSTID' in Organisations AND 'economic future' in Titles but NOT "tropical" in Titles. For collections that allow casefolding and stemming, these options can be set differently for each field of search.

Search Parameters

There are lots of search parameters which you can set on the alternate search forms. (The quick search will use all the default values for these parameters.) This collection supports the following:

• Turn casefolding : If casefolding is 'on', then ignore case (upper vs lower) distinctions when searching. For example, SNAIL would match snail and Snail. Otherwise, case must match.
• Turn stemming : If stemming is 'on', then ignore word endings and match words that have the same root, for example computer would match computing. Otherwise, the entire word must match.
• Match: A 'some' search will return documents that contain one or more of the search terms, while an 'all' search will only return documents that contain all of the search terms.
• Sort search results by: The ordering of search results. By rank, build order or predefined metadata field.
• Index to search in: This determines the scope of the search - the search might be over the full text, or restricted to metadata elements.
• Maximum hits to return: How many document results to return.
• Query string: The words or phrase to search for.
• _ServiceRack_param.hitsPerPage_: How many hits per page of search results to show.

Understanding your Search Results

By default, your search results are presented in order of relevance: those documents more closely matching the search terms are presented first. This can be changed using the search options on the alternate search pages.

Help with Documents

The document page can look quite different depending on how the collection is configured and what the source document was like. Some collections will display a table of metadata, with a link to the original, e.g. PDF, file. Other collections will convert their import documents to HTML, and display the HTML on the document page. If this is structured, there will be a table of contents displayed. Scanned image documents will display with a contents box that shows thumbnails of the pages.

Table of Contents

Structured documents may be displayed with a table of contents. There are two main types of table of contents: Structured, and Paged Image. The former is for documents with sections and subsections, and displays a hierarchical list of section titles; the latter is for scanned image documents, and shows a list of thumbnails. Clicking a section title or thumbnail will open up the corresponding section/page of the document. Clicking 'Expand Document' will open up all the sections of the document, while 'Contract Document' will close them all. A Filter Pages options is provided with the Paged Image contents: use it to narrow down the range of thumbnail images shown.

There are a few different icon buttons that you may find on the document page:

Search term highlighting: if this is selected, then Greenstone will highlight the search terms that occur in the document.

Float the Table of Contents - Locks the contents to the side of the screen so that it won't move when scrolling.

Image Zoomer: if this is selected then moving the cursor over an image will show an enlarged version of the image.

View a slideshow of the images contained in the document.

Favourites

A favourites option is available - this can be switched on/off in the preferences page. In search results or browsing lists, you can click on the icon by each document to add it to your favourites. The icon will highlight () to show that the document is in the list. Clicking again will remove it. A small box on the right hand side of the page will give you a link to view your favourites. From there you can delete favourites, view in different formats, and email the list to yourself.