Help. Getting started
Using entry points for topics, places, and dates
The home page is a good and easy place to start exploring of the IBCC Digital Archive. It has an intuitive menu of topics, places and dates. These entry points provide shortcuts to relevant items in the archive, created by experts who have thoroughly assessed each document capturing only substantial content and ignoring passing references.
→ This approach is highly intuitive but less complete.
Searching for keywords
Type a keyword or a search phrase into the search box to explore the entire content of the Archive. This covers both descriptive information added by cataloguers (such as titles and descriptions) plus the content of transcribed documents or interviews. When multiple keywords are typed in the search box, they are automatically stringed into a search phrase. For instance, while searching for mess dress, the system will only display documents containing that exact sequence of words. It will not retrieve items that only contain mess or only contain dress.
→ This approach allows extremely thorough searches but is affected by the way keywords are entered.
Top tips:
- Please be aware that this search mode is rigid: consider synonyms, spelling variants, and typos.
- This approach yields better results when using fewer, highly specific keywords. For instance, while searching for
Flying Officer William Leslie Milne Anderson (1925 - 2018, 196733 Royal Air Force), the best approach is to start from the unique or most distinctive pieces of information: either196733orMilne. Both searches point to the relevant collection, which contains all relevant items. Putting the whole string in the search box, hoping to get more focused results, will return zero hits. - Hits may sometimes include irrelevant items:
station, for instance, can be a place where trains stop and a Royal Air Force establishment; it may also be part of totally irrelevant nouns such asstationaryorstationery. Check the whole list of hits before concluding that the Archive has nothing relevant to your query.
Exploring collections
The Archive keeps items organised in collections. All documents received by a person or an organisation are preserved and published as a whole, including oral history interviews.
Items within a collection share a common history: meaning and significance emerge in context, and this is what a collection is primarily intended to preserve. As a general rule, collections are named after the person that is their subject and normally coincide with the private papers of that individual.
→ This is the best approach if you are looking for the papers of or the interview with a named individual.