LINCOLN/NET Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project Sponsored by the Illinois State Library

1. Introduction
2. Searching the Bibliography
    2.1 Bibliographic Fields
    2.2 Retrieving and Navigating Documents
3. Character Representation for Search Terms
    3.1 Accents and Special Characters
    3.2 Wildcard Characters and Boolean Operators
    3.3 Punctuation Marks and Searching
4. Selecting a Search Option
    4.1 Single Term and Phrase Search (Default)
    4.2 Proximity Searching in the Same Sentence or Paragraph
5. Selecting a Results Format
    5.1. Concordance Report (300 characters plus)
    5.2. KWIC Report (a single line of text)
    5.3. Frequency by Title
    5.4. Frequency by Author
    5.5. Navigating Documents from Word Searches

Database-Specific Searching Tips

Bibliographic Searching:
Author and Title: When entering authors or titles, punctuation and spacing must match exactly that in the on-line bibliography.
Date: The works in the database currently range in date of publication from 1803 to 1981.
Theme: To limit one's search to a particular theme, simply enter the theme into the Theme Field. One may search more than one theme at a time; the vertical bar ( | ) serves as the OR operator (e.g., entering Law and Society|Economic Development searches both).

African-Americans Black Hawk War Campaign of 1858 DeKalb Economic Development Frontier Settlement Law and Society	Lincoln Native American Relations Political Development Presidential Campaigns Religion and Culture Women and Gender

Genre: To limit one's search to a particular genre, simply enter the genre into the Genre Field. One may search more than one genre at a time; the vertical bar ( | ) serves as the OR operator (e.g., entering memoir|autobiography searches both).

advice literature article autobiography biography diary fiction government document	history interview letter memoir narrative note pamphlet	poetry political tract proceedings reminiscence sermon song speech travelogue

Orthographic Considerations:
No unusual orthography has been detected in this database. Expect elisions such as wing'd and 'neath. Both British and American spellings of words have been entered (e.g., honour and honor). Wildcard characters or Boolean operators can help detect such inconsistencies. One could enter wing.d or hono.?r or honor|honour to achieve the desired results.

Data-Entry Idiosyncrasies:
Several data errors have been detected in some databases either from typesetting errors in the original source or from converting the documents. One should avoid making arguments from silence. In particular, look out for confusion from similarity of letters (e.g., vvest for west) and word-clustering.

Punctuation and Full-Text Searching:
Hyphens: Hypens act as word separators. Thus, one should treat hypenated expressions as separate words excluding the hyphen (e.g. if searching for ever-changing, type in ever changing.)
Apostrophes: One must include apostrophes when searching words with apostrophes in them (e.g., only by typing god's will one find "God's"). In this database apostrophes do not act as word separators. Therefore contractions and elisions must be entered without spaces before or after the apostrophe.
Ampersands: The ampersand (&) is not a searchable character. Avoid Phrase Searches where an ampersand may be used as a conjunction.

Formatting and Display:
Notes: There are notes throughout the database. In PhiloLogic notes never interfere when searching the text to which they refer. Note references are linked to notes and text from notes are linked to page references, but not from a first-level results screen.
Images: There are several images throughout the database. Inline images and links to non-inline images display once the user pulls up any level of context (e.g., page, paragraph, h3, h2, and h1), but not from a first-level results screen.
Sound: Buttons for the RealAudio sound files are located at the beginning of documents. Click on the title and the first section after "header." The RealPlayer is required to listen to sound files. Download Now

Please check the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project Text Database errata page for the most current information on problems regarding the database or its PhiloLogic implementation.

For questions or comments concerning the Project please contact:
Drew E. VandeCreek, Director, Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project
Founders Memorial Library, Northern Illinois University
drew@niu.edu