How to Search the USFSP Digital Archive

By Carol Hixson, DeanNelson Poynter Memorial Library

May 31, 2014

Welcome to the USFSP Digital Archivehttp://dspace.nelson.usf.edu/

Many ways to search

• Use a search box to search a word or phrase• Use a Browse index to browse through lists of

authors, titles, subjects, and more• Search the entire archive• Search a section of the archive• Use the Advanced Search option• Search through the Internet

What is searched?

• All words in a file– Word documents, PDFs, Text files, PowerPoint

presentations, etc.• A program runs nightly to create full-text indexes of all

files added to the archive that day

• All words used to describe a file– These words are indexed as soon as the item is

added to the archive

Search options on main page of archive

Search DSpace and Search USFSP’s Digital Archive both search the entire archive

Browse fixed indexes for entirearchive

Opens up Advanced Search boxes

On other pages you have the option to search only within that section

Use a search box to look for a word or phrase. Enter the word(s) and click the

GO button

A word search across the entire archive retrieves every item where the search term appears somewhere in a file

You can look through the list by clicking Next Page but too many entries are hard to look through

You can resort any list of items by relevance, issue date, title, or submit date

What do the different sorts mean?

• Relevance: items where the search term occurs more frequently will appear first

• Issue date: the date that an item was created or presented (such as a publication date or date of a presentation)

• Title: the title of the item in the archive• Submit date: the date that the item was added to the archive

(which is usually different from the Issue date)• Descending: shows the most recent date first; or shows titles

beginning with the last letter of the alphabet first• Ascending: shows the oldest date first; or shows titles

beginning with the first letter of the alphabet first

Results sorted by issue date in descending order (newest first)

Phrase searching

• Searching a phrase without quotation marks will find any file that has any of the words appearing anywhere in the item. Files that contain more of the words somewhere will appear closer to the top of the list, if the list is sorted by relevance

• Searching a phrase with quotation marks will find only files that have all of the words in the same order somewhere in the item

Phrase searching without quotation marks (smoking on campus) – means that all of the search words appear somewhere in the

listed items, but not necessarily together: 230 hits

Phrase searching with quotation marks (“smoking on campus”) – means that the entire phrase must appear

together somewhere in the listed items: 6 hits

Searching within a community or collection

• Every community and collection page has a search box that only searches that section of the archive

• It is also possible to limit searches to the community or collection by selecting from those options on the right-hand side of the page

Searching within a community or collection – search box appears right below the name

Or you can select ThisCollectionon right

Searching within a community or collection – same rules apply for searching words and phrases

Browse searches exist for the whole archive, within communities, and within collections

Browse by Issue Date: Sort by Ascending displays oldest first; Descending displays newest first

Issue Date

This is the date of creation, publication, or presentation of

the item

You can also Jump to a point in the index if you know when the item was published or presented

Browse by Title: Sort by Ascending displays from the start of the alphabet; Descending displays from the end of the alphabet

Titles

• The archive ignores an article (the, a, an) in English-language titles if it occurs as the first word in the title• No words are ignored for titles in

other languages

Browse by Author: Sort by Ascending is from the start of the alphabet, Descending is from the end of the alphabet

Authors

• Authors’ names are assigned based on the way they appear in the materials being added to the archive. They appear Last name, First name

• A name with a period will index differently from a name without a period – what looks to be the same name may appear twice in the index display and will retrieve different items if one has a period at the end and the other doesn’t

• There are no cross references from one form of an author’s name to another but the Library tries to put all entries for the same person under the same form

You can jump to another part of a Browse index by clicking on the letter of the alphabet or by entering

letters or a complete name in the search box

Subjects

• Subjects are freely assigned by whoever puts an item in the archive

• Most items have not had subjects assigned

• Full-text indexing of all PDFs, documents, and presentations makes the addition of subject terms less necessary

Browse by Subject: Because all items are full-text searchable, most items in the archive have not had subjects assigned. A subject

search will retrieve only a small portion of what’s in the archive

Search a section of the archive

• Use the list of communities and collections to find a general area of interest

• Within that area, you can search for specific words or phrases

• This can help reduce the number of hits that are not directly related

• If you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can go back to searching the whole archive

Search a word or phrase within a specific section of the archive

Searching within a specific collection: 7 hits for phrase “parenting skills”

Searching within entire archive: 111 hits for phrase “parenting skills”

Using Advanced Search allows you to search within communities and to limit the fields of data

Because the archive is registered with Google and other search engines, you can search through the Internet and find materials that are in the Digital Archive

Questions?

Send any questions about searching and search results to

digcol@nelson.usf.edu