The Region List dialog lets you select a geographical area. The dialog lets you select a broad geographical area category, and, optionally, to narrow down the focus by selecting from a set of smaller regions that are included within the broad category.
As an example, suppose you are looking for maps of the Congo. When the Region list dialog comes up, it looks as follows:
The first step is to select the broad cateogry "Africa" from the first drop-down list. The second, narrow category, drop-down list will be modified to just include the categories within the broad category. So click on the down-arrow at the right of the lower drop-down list and scroll the list until you come to "CONGO" and click on it to select it. (Or you can click anywhere on the lower drop-down list and start typing C-O-N-G-O. You will notice that CONGO is selected as soon as you type C, since it is the only name beginning with C in the narrow-category list for Africa. (You can stop typing as soon as the desired name has been found.) Then click the Select button, and the following text will be put into the text box:
AFRICA: CONGO
If you only want to select a broad geographical category, click on the radiobutton labelled "Select only by broad category". The narrow category drop-down list will be hidden, and when you click Select, just the broad category name will be put into the text box. If, for example, you wanted to select Blaeu maps of Africa, you could enter Blaeu in the Map-Maker field and use the List in the Region field, as described here, to select the broad category "Africa". (Of course, for a simple case like this, you could also just type the word Africa into the text box.)
If the text box for Region information already has something in it, the buttons in the Region List dialog will look a little different, as follows:
After selecting from the drop-down lists, click either:
· Replace the previous contents of the text box will be erased and will be replaced by the values chosen from the lists.
· Add (with OR) the choices from the lists will be added to what is already in the text box, with a connecting OR between them.
Note: The broad category drop-down list has 20 entries. Two of the New World categories ("America" and "North America") are actually supersets of other broad category designations. If you choose "America" the narrow-category drop-down list will include all region names from the other New World categories (Canada, United States, West Indies, North America, South America, and Central America). If you choose "North America", the narrow-category drop-down list will also include the region names for the subsumed areas (Canada and the United States).
See the description of the Region database field for a full description of how what you enter in the Region text box will be used for searchng.