How To Search

Clicking on the 'Browse' button brings up a menu which you can think of as a choose-your-own-adventure portal into the collections. Want to explore a particular collection? Archival Descriptions is the path for you. More interested in tracking a particular individual, wherever they choose to stray? Try Authority Records. Right now, Archival Institutions just gives you details of the Stationers' Company, and we haven't yet tackled Functions or Places (is there anywhere outside of London??? just kidding... ). But Subjects is a fun one, if you want to get all nitty and gritty with book history. And Digital Objects leads you into the expanding world of digital images in the Stationers' Company Archive.

If you already know what you're looking for, and frankly don't have time for all this browsing nonsense, you can go straight to the search box. By default, this carries out a basic global search, but there's a drop-down menu next to the search box which will allow you to carry out a basic search on just the Stationers' Company Archive, or an Advanced Search (more about that in the next section). The global search isn't actually global, but it does search all of the collections in this catalogue, and we're guessing/hoping that's what you're looking for.

If you enter more than one search term into the search box, by default the search uses an AND operator – this means that the search will return all entries in the catalogue that contain all of the words you entered. The words need not necessarily be next to one another: they might be on separate lines or in different paragraphs in an entry, but the entry will still be returned in the search results.

To limit the results to entries which have a particular phrase, surround your search string with inverted commas. And you can find more tips in our Refining your Search Terms section.

For the full-on pro experience, select Advanced search from the drop-down menu next to the search bar.

This is the real deal. You don't just get to enter a search term. You can choose which field to search in. And then you can use the Add new criteria pulldown, and the power of Boolean operators, to bolt on more search terms in more fields, like clicking together bricks of supercharged search-engine Lego.

For example, if you want to find all registers of entries of copies that don't contain references to Shakespeare, you can type entries of copies into the search box, select the field to Title, choose Not from Add new criteria, type Shakespear* in the second search bar, and pick Scope and Content for your second field choice (to find out why we chose Shakespear* instead of Shakespeare, check out Refining your Search Terms).

You can then go on to limit and filter results by repository, level of description, format and date. And it's straightforward to print or export your results.

Whether your search is basic or advanced, there are some tips worth knowing to get the best out of that search bar. For a start, we've been throwing out references to Boolean operators quite casually, but just in case you need a refresher, the three basic operators you'll see spelled out here are:

AND

- a search for term_1 AND term_2 returns every result where both term_1 and term_2 appear

OR

- a search for term_1 AND term_2 returns every result where either term_1 or term_2 appears

NOT

- strictly speaking, you could search for NOT term_1, and get all records that don't contain term_1. But a more useful application of our friendly negative is to search for term_1 AND NOT term_2, which returns every result where only term_1 and not term_2 appear

Wildcards are another useful tool. They allow you to get partial matches in your search. If you use Shakespeare as a search term, you'll only get entries that contain that exact word. But if you use Shakespear* as a search term, you get entries with Shakespeare, but also Shakespeare's and Shakespearean. Neat, huh?

The wildcards you can use in this catalogue are:

?

Single character wildcard. Example: p?per will find paper and piper, but not pepper.

*

Multiple character wildcard. Example: galax* will find galaxy and galaxies, but not galactic.

~

Strictly speaking, not a wildcard, but useful so we're including it here. It's a fuzzy search operator, so it returns results with words similar to the search term. Example: fjord~ will return fjord, fjords, ford, form, fonds, etc.

If jazzing up your search terms is your jam, there's more to explore on this excellent AtoM documentation page, from which we shamelessly stole the wildcard explainers above.

If you're lucky enough to have used this fabulous resource, you've probably come to this catalogue expecting you can just transfer your references over. And you can. Sort of. Thing is, when the AMD resource went live, the collection wasn't fully catalogued and, as happens, some things changed. So in order to get those AMD references to line up with what we have here, you'll probably need to tweak them. Here's how:

Switch 'TSC/1/' to 'TSC/'

As the catalogue grew, we realised the original system was adding several extra layers of complexity to what was already a complex structure. So the next stage involved trying to simplify it, and one of the first things to go was '1' after 'TSC' (we literally took things down a level). For many of the AMD entries, that's all you need to change. E.g., if you want to find the record labelled TSC/1/B/01/01 in Literary Print Culture, in this catalogue you put in TSC/B/01/01. It's as simple as that!

If that doesn't work

For some record series, there was more restructuring involved. This was particularly the case for the English Stock records. In those situations, we've incorporated the AMD references into the records as alternative identifiers, so just drop the full AMD ref into the search box, and let the magic of the search engine do its thing.

If that still doesn't work ...

... that's on us! We do our best, but we've clearly missed your record out, so please contact us. That way, we can help you out, and also update the catalogue so no-one else has this problem.

If you've managed to get your hands on this amazing book, congratulations - you're set for life! (at least as far as researching the Stationers' Company goes) We love this book and fully recognise our debt to it, so we've tried to incorporate its reference numbers as alternative reference numbers wherever we can. If you drop the ref from Robin's book into the search box, you should get directed to the relevant record in this catalogue. But if that doesn't work, please let us know so we can put that right.