Tips for Searching
Most users of the collection are interested in one of two things. Either they are interested in what we hold on a specific geographic region or they are interested in comparing a subject, such as prisons or railways across a number of regions, or indeed the whole Commonwealth. Some readers, of course, are interested in a very specific subject, or in a particular person. The tips which follow should prove useful to all of these categories of user and indeed to all who wish to use the collection.
Q. Classmark stem searching
Classmark stem searching is recommended for finding material in this collection primarily because it will reveal the entire holdings of a serial more easily than other search methods. Although the title of a serial may have changed several times over its existence the stem classmark will usually remain the same. A fairly uncommon exception to this is when, for example, an additional department is incorporated into a report and then later a separate report covering this department is issued. Classmark stem searching is also particularly suited to searching for resources on a specific geographic region, or a small number of regions.
In order to conduct this type of search an awareness of classmark construction and country classification is required. For a table listing country classification numbers please click here. A small amount of time spent mastering this technique will be time well spent. Examples of classmark stems used for the official publications in the RCS collection are as follows:
RCS.L.BB.31.
RCS.YD.31.
RCS.L.311.M3.
RCS.L.38.1.
The stem will usually be followed by a running no. (1,2,3,4,5 etc.) or the year of publication (1954,1955 etc.) All official publications in the RCS collection will begin RCS.L. where RCS signifies the collection to which the resource belongs and "L" signifies the official or semi-official status of the resource.
Q. Simple boolean searching
The simplest form of Boolean searching, use of the Boolean operator AND, will serve the needs of many of our users. Other Boolean operators include NOT and OR though an explanation of the use of these operators is not given here. By using the Boolean operator AND searches like those below can be conducted:
railways and malaysia
broadcasting and Singapore
agriculture and sudan
posts and telegraphs and malaya
health and "hong kong"
The first of these searches will retrieve all records which contain the word railways and the word Malaysia no matter where in the record these words appear. Searching by this method is not case sensitive though it is important to note that when using more than one word such as Hong Kong, in the final example, that the phrase must be enclosed in speech marks (“hong kong”). If speech marks are not used in some searches the system will be unable to interpret the search and a message to this effect will appear on the screen. Searches can be made more specific through the use of a second AND operator as in the penultimate example above. This search will retrieve only records which contain all three words.
Those wishing to perform Boolean searching should use the Basic Search option in Newton, typing the search (e.g. railways and Malaysia) in to the box under Search for and selecting Boolean in the drop down list of options under Search by. Failure to select Boolean will either result in the system being unable to interpret your search or in the retrieval of up to 10,000 records containing either/any, rather than both/all, of your search terms anywhere in the record.
Q. Right-truncated searching
This type of search allows the user to search using only the beginning of a word when the exact ending is unknown, the search term has a variant ending or the search term may appear in singular or plural. Right-truncated searching can be combined with simple Boolean searching. For example agriculture and malay? An example of when this search method may be useful is when searching for information on the Federated Malay States, Malaya or Malaysia. If resources on this geographic region are required the user can simply enter the right-truncated search malay? and records containing any of the three variations of the word (Malay, Malaya and Malaysia) will be displayed. It should be noted that this search will obviously not display material covering the Straits Settlements and thus a classmark stem search may still be preferable in this case.
Right-truncated searching can be, and is best, used within the Boolean search option (see above). For example malay? and agriculture or simply malay? Right-truncated searching can also be used under the Keyword anywhere and Title options. Use of the Keyword anywhere option, however, is likely to return more results than users would normally want whilst use of the Title option will only retrieve records with titles beginning with the search term and not records which contain the search term elsewhere in the title.