Keywords

To capture the wealth of our holdings our cataloguers assign keywords to items of particular interest. You can search by using these to discover good examples of your areas of interest. A facility is available to extend the search to allow the user to study the results of a full text search of the Archive. However, such results will be a lot less specific and users will find less relevant mentions of the subject

Keywords will identify important items or examples but will not find all the relevant content, as we are still keywording material. Keywording of records is a lengthy and subjective process so it is wise to consider following a keyword search with other searches. We welcome offers of specialist help with the indexing processes.

A text search may throw up a lot of “noise” but it may be worth trying if other searches do not find enough for your purposes.

Common synonyms and alternative spellings of words (eg water mill and watermill) are handled automatically by the search glossary and thesaurus.

Certain keywords are used to help to organise the site, for example the educational search engine looks only at items with the keyword education.