AM Impact: Searching guide

Watch this short video on how to run a search across all your AM primary source collections in AM Search.

If you want to find a document from within our collections, you can do this by using the main search bar on the AM Search homepage, or within the header.

• The search algorithm will consider the total number of search hits within the document and use hits within metadata as an indicator of a higher degree of relevance in ordering the list of results. For example, searching for coffee will pull up every document where coffee is mentioned in the metadata or, where available, within the text itself.
• When doing a search that is a phrase or longer than one word, use double quotation marks to ensure you return accurate results. For example, entering “United States” in quotation marks will return a list of results where United States appears as a joined-up phrase, rather than United OR States.
• You can filter your results by collection by clicking on a collection name in the filter panel and applying the filter.
• Once you have found a document of interest, clicking on the title will open a pop-up document summary box. This contains key information and metadata about the document such as the primary source collection name, date and document type.
• Clicking on ‘view document’ in the document summary will open up the document in a new tab within the relevant primary source collection.

Collections page in AM Search lists all the online primary source collections available to you from across AM.

• Scroll down the page to view all collections, and click on the tile of the collection you are interested in to open it in a new tab.
• To help you find collections relevant to your research, use the filters to look at specific collections within a theme, time period or region.
• To look at new collections added to your holdings, filter by ‘New’.
• Once inside a collection, to begin browsing the primary sources, choose the ‘View Documents’ tab in the navigation bar.
• From there, you are presented with filter options. For example, in Africa and New Imperialism, you can filter by date, region, document type, language and library/archive.
• If you are interested in diaries relating to Nigeria, for instance, you can filter by document type ‘Diaries & Journals’ and the region ‘West Africa’.
• If you then wanted to narrow this down to the experiences documented within diaries from the 1880s you could apply a date range from 1880-1890.

• Consider how place names and spellings may have changed over time. For example, Sri Lanka was renamed from Ceylon in 1972, so searching for Ceylon OR “Sri Lanka” is likely to return more results than "Sri Lanka".
• Historical events are often referred to in different ways by modern authors than they were in primary source material from the period. For example, the First World War was often referred to as The Great War during the period. So running a search for “Great War” is likely to bring up more primary source documents from the period.
• Think about the language and terminology within your search. Please be aware, due to the historical nature of this material, the language that is used to refer to marginalised peoples is often derogatory or offensive by modern standards.
• For example, searching for "runaway slaves" or runaways can provide useful search results for enslaved people making attempts to seek freedom. While this is problematic, consider that those words and terms may return search results and can thus be used to uncover attitudes held both within society during the period, and by the writers who authored the documents.

Use Boolean Operators in your search to broaden searches and to narrow down search results.

• Boolean Operators AND, OR and NOT can be inserted between keywords when searching.
• For example, to return results in which ‘coffee’ and ‘trade’ appear anywhere in the document or metadata, use AND between terms: coffee AND trade.
• To return results that have either coffee or trade anywhere in the document or metadata, add OR between terms: coffee OR trade.
• To return results in which coffee appears but trade does not appear, add NOT between terms: coffee NOT trade.