There are four text boxes into which you can type words on which to search. Each of the four text boxes has a drop-down list of fields to its right. Use the drop-down list to select the field in which you want to search for the words that you enter. To reduce the amount of selecting that you need to do, the four drop-down lists start out with four different field selections: Map Maker, Title or Original AMPR Title, Region, and All Fields. If you want to do a search using just one or more of these pre-selected fields, just type the search words into the text boxes to the left of the appropriate field names. However, you are always free to change any of the four drop-down lists to select any field. You may enter text into any or all of the four text boxes; you do not need to start from the top. If you want to search for Paris in a title, you could just enter this word in the second text box (since its associated drop-down list is already initialized for searching in the Title field), and click the Perform Search button.
For four of the fields (Map-Maker, Region, References, and Dealer), a List button will be displayed to the right of the text box. This allows you to pick a choice from a list, as an alternative to typing in the desired search value.
See the section on Map-Maker, Reference and Dealer Lists for details of how to use the List dialog for these categories.
See the section on Region Lists for details of how to use the List dialog for selection of a geographical region.
See the section on Database Fields for a full description of each of the available fields that can be chosen in the drop-down lists.
You may type a single word, or multiple (space-separated) words into the text boxes. There are three different kinds of text information you can enter:
· Single words – will match a field entry containing exactly the word entered.
· Words with patterns – words which contain an asterisk, a question mark, or a set of characters within square brackets. This kind of search is also referred to as a "wild-card" search. The rules for these pattern searches are described in the section on Text Search Rules.
· Phrases – two or more words contained in double-quotes (e.g. "United States"), which will match a field entry that contains the same phrase, but will not match a field that contains all the phrase’s words in a different order or with intervening words.
These three kinds of search entries can be combined. See the section on Text Search Rules for a complete description of the way text searching is done. This section also describes the boolean operators (and/or) that you can specify when entering text in more than one of the text boxes. Also, look at the section of Text Search Examples.
All text searching is case-independent. If you search for France, this will match the word France, FRANCE, or france. Therefore, it does not matter whether you use upper, lower, or mixed case when entering search phrases.
Some common words, referred to as stopwords, are ignored when performing searches. See the section on Stopwords for a list of these words.
Overview topic: The Search Screen