What Gets Searched¶

This section explains what gets searched when you type keywords in the search box. It does not cover Advanced Search which works differently because it searches specific fields.

Terminology¶

To understand what gets searched, you need to understand these terms.

Public and non-Public Items

A public item is one that anyone can see. In contrast, only a logged-in Digital Archive user can see non-public items. Most items in a collection are public, but an archivist may choose to make some items non-public because the item is being worked on and not yet ready for public viewing, or because the organization does not have permission to share the item.

Public and Private Metadata Fields

Each of an item's metadata fields are designated as either public or private. A public field is one that anyone can see in a public item. A private field is one that only a logged-in Digital Archive user can see. The text of a PDF file attachment is considered public if attached to a public item and private if attached to a non-public item.

Visible Items and Fields

Which items and fields get searched depends on whether or not the user is allowed to see them. A search performed by a logged-in user will search all items and all fields. A search performed by someone who is not logged-in will search only the public fields of public items. Put another way, all items and fields are visible to a logged-in user, but only public fields of public items are visible to a user who is not logged-in.

What a keyword search finds¶

When you type keywords in the search box, the Digital Archive examines:

• Every item in the collection that is visible to the user
• The metadata of every one of an item's fields that is visible to the user
• The text of a visible item's PDF file attachments (the PDF itself must be searchable)

If the keywords exist in one or more of the item's visible metadata fields, that item will show up as a search result. The words do not need to all exist together in the same field unless they have been enclosed in double quotes as a phrase.

Relevance¶

The searching logic assigns a score to each item that results from a keyword search. The higher the score, the more relevant the result. Higher scoring items appear in the search results above lower scoring items.

Search results will be returned in order from most to least relevant, but only for keyword searches on 'All fields' with the 'All words' or 'Boolean' condition. Relevancy searching is not supported for 'Titles only', the 'Contains' condition, or when searching by fields, year range, or tags.

The ranking of results is based on the following from highest to lowest:

• The keywords appear in the Title field and the item's type is 'Reference'
• The keywords appear in the Title field.
• The item's type is 'Reference'
• The keywords appear in the Description field
• The keywords appear in other fields, but not in the Title or Description