East Asia: Searching AM databases

The federated search at AM Search allows you to access all of the AM content held by your institution: this short video explains the basics of searching your entire range of titles.

Searching guides can be found in many of the resources such as the searching guide in Meiji Japan. This Searching Guide is intended to provide help and advice to researchers on how to navigate archival materials, how to search and browse effectively and sift through the documents within Meiji Japan to uncover narratives and voices that deviate from the dominant or mainstream voices presented. The searching guide asks students to consider how place names, or the names given to regions, change over time. For example, using ‘Tokio’, ‘Edo’ or ‘Yedo’ rather than ‘Tokyo’.

Consider how place names, or the names given to regions, change over time. For example, carry out searches using older spellings or former names of places – such as using ‘Tokio’, ‘Edo’ or ‘Yedo’ rather than ‘Tokyo’. The region often referred to today as ‘East Asia’ may be referred to as the ‘Far East’ in English-language sources included in this collection.

Various methods of Romanizing the Chinese language have been used in the West. You will find a mixture of accepted Romanizing methods across documents created by Westerners, as well as some highly idiosyncratic or phonetic spellings of people and places.

Our search engine has been programmed to recognise the possible multiplicity of place and personal names, and so will return search results for a number of alternative spellings of a place or person, regardless of which spelling is entered in the search, for instance, 'Macao' or 'Macau'.

Use Boolean operators while searching either in Basic Search or Advanced Search in order to target searching and narrow down search results.

Boolean operators ‘AND’, ‘OR’ and ‘NOT’ can be inserted between keywords when searching. 

For example:  

• To return results in which both Yedo and Nagasaki appear, use AND between terms.
• To return results which have either Yedo or Nagasaki, add OR between terms.
• To return results in which Yedo but not Nagasaki appears, add NOT between terms. This will search for Yedo but exclude any pages which also include Nagasaki.

Within Basic Search this can be formatted as “Yedo” AND “Nagasaki”.

Within Advanced Search select Boolean operators from the drop-down menu.

If you want to explore an individual database, use the video below for tips on getting started, browsing and using the interactive tools in AM resources. Titles with relevance to East Asia are listed here.

Historical events are often referred to in different ways by contemporaneous authors, different contemporaneous communities, and modern sources.

• For example, the 'Boxer Rising’ can also be referred to as the ‘Boxer Rebellion’ or the ‘Yihetuan Movement’. Considering how this may have been referred to at the time, it’s possible that the word ‘rebellion’, ‘insurrection’, ‘revolt’, and ‘uprising’ may have been used rather than fully naming the event as modern researchers would.

In some instances, searching will not yield results; in those cases, use the filters or Browsing Pathways to narrow down your list of documents where you suspect accounts of the ‘First Sino-Japanese War’ may occur.

• For example, filter the dates from ’25 July 1894’ to ’17 April 1895’; read through these documents in order to discover how this event was reported on and discussed at the time.