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Bibliographic Searching in order to limit a search by fields or to retrieve selected documents:
Author: (e.g., Lincoln)
Title: (e.g., Ottawa)
   

Note: The vertical line ( | ) is the OR operator (e.g., pioneers|settlers or vast|entire wilderness). For pattern matching one may employ wildcard characters (e.g., evang.* retrieves evangelize, evangelized, evangelist, etc.). For more help in searching see User Documentation below.
Search Text(s) for:    (e.g., slavery)

  

Select a Search Option:
A. (Default) Single Term and Phrase Search
B. Proximity Searching: in the same Sentence
                                 Paragraph
                                Separated by words in the same sentence.
Note: in proximity searches a space serves as the AND operator.

Select a Results Format:
A. (Default) Concordance Report (300 characters plus)  
B. KWIC Report (a single line of text)  
C. Frequency by Title  

General User Documentation for PhiloLogic

Database-Specific Searching Tips

Bibliographic Searching:

Author and Title: When entering authors or titles, punctuation and spacing must match exactly that in the on-line bibliography.

Orthographic Considerations:

No unusual orthography has been detected in this database. Expect elisions such as wing'd and 'neath. Both British and American spellings of words have been entered (e.g., honour and honor). Wildcard characters or Boolean operators can help detect such inconsistencies. One could enter wing.d or hono.?r or honor|honour to achieve the desired results.

Data-Entry Idiosyncrasies:

Several data errors have been detected in some databases either from typesetting errors in the original source or from rekeying/OCRing the documents. One should avoid making arguments from silence. In particular, look out for the transposition or doubling of letters, similar letters (e.g., thc) or word-clustering.

Punctuation and Full-Text Searching

Hyphens: Hyphens act as word separators. Thus, one should treat hyphenated expressions as separate words excluding the hyphen (e.g. if searching for ever-changing, type in ever changing.)
Apostrophes: One must include apostrophes when searching words with apostrophes in them (e.g., only by typing god's will one find "God's"). In this database apostrophes do not act as word separators. Therefore contractions and elisions must be entered without spaces before or after the apostrophe.
Ampersands: The ampersand (&) is not a searchable character. Avoid Phrase Searches where an ampersand may be used as a conjunction.

Formatting and Display

Character Display:
Notes: There are notes throughout the database. In PhiloLogic notes never interfere when searching the text to which they refer. Note references are linked to notes and text from notes are linked to page references.
Images: There are several images throughout the database. Most are displayed as inline images once the user pulls up any level of context (e.g., page, paragraph, h3, h2, and h1), but not from a first-level results screen.

Please check the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project Text Database errata page for the most current information on problems regarding the database or its PhiloLogic implementation.
Please direct comments or queries about this service to ets@lib.uchicago.edu.

For questions or comments concerning the Project please contact:
Drew E. VandeCreek, Director of Digital Projects
28 Founders Memorial Library
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
drew@niu.edu

The ARTFL Project   |   Northern Illinois University Libraries