- The following tips can help you improve your search technique.
- The easiest way to locate an item in Album is through the search box on the home page. Keep your search simple. If you are searching for a person, group, business, neighborhood, etc., just enter its name, or as much of it as you can recall.
- Some people refer to individuals, neighborhoods, or buildings by nickname (i.e. some refer to Ponce de Leon Park as Poncey or by its previous formal name, Spiller Field). When searching, be sure to consider the different terms used to describe people, places, and things.
- Use the date fields to narrow your search. Many subjects are indexed by decade, so when narrowing your search by date use dates like 1960 and 1970, unless you looking for a specific year.
- Searching is not case sensitive. Peachtree Street is the same peachtree street.
- Album will not recognize partial words (i.e. peach will not locate the term Peachtree Street, nor will African American locate African Americans, etc.).
- Be sure to utilize correct spelling. Unlike Google search, for example, Album DOES NOT offer suggestions with alternative spellings. Album DOES NOT offer suggestions for related searches when certain words are entered. For example, if you search for houses, the database would not suggest related searches such as dwellings or homes. Again, be aware of variations among search terms
- Use the radio buttons below the search box on the home page and on the Advanced Search page to indicate the format(s) you are looking for. If you want to view video clips only, then select Video and leave Photographs and Audio blank. The A/V collection is smaller and therefore, less broadly indexed relative to the photograph collections on Album. Users may have some difficulty in locating desired content through the search page. An alternative way to find audio and video files is to click on the Collections tab at the top of the page and access the phrase Audio/Visual Collections which will take you directly to collections pages where viewers can browse or search files containing A/V content.
- The Advanced Search feature allows for collection-specific searches in addition to item-level queries of the full database. The Advanced Search allows you to specify whether the search results should contain any or all of the words entered, enter an exact phrase, or exclude words from the search. The Advanced Search also allows you to create a Boolean search by using the dropdown boxes to specify whether you want and or or between words. You may also limit the search to specific collections on the site by highlighting a collection and clicking Add.
- A series of quick links on the home page provides access to the most popular image topics. Each link contains all the items (in all formats) indexed by that particular term. Clicking on a thumbnail or title will generate search results or yield narrower categories. Some of these topics contain thousands of images and for the sake of convenience are divided into categories (i.e. Politics is divided into decades)
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