Search Enhancements, March 2009
Apr 14th, 2009 by sharbrough
Search for a person
Let’s go back to the Footnote home page. Where I typed a keyword, there was another choice, above the box, “Person.” Clicking that, and typing “George” for the given name and “Bush” for the surname give a very different result from the one we saw with a keyword search.
We have 2135 hits in 25 titles. No newspapers. City Directories contain only 11 hits. 1930 Census has 608 matches.
I want to add that this same search produced 2105 results and 599 matches from the 1930 census a week ago. It’s not clear to me whether there are slight changes in the search results from day to day, or whether a bit of data is being added.
However that may be, returning to our search for a person gives us two easy approaches to take with our 2135 results. We can “Tell us more to get better results” or we can choose one of the 25 titles listed.
Clicking on “Tell us more” yields a search template that includes not only name, but also a place to enter a US State (sorry, international researchers, but it is a site consisting decidedly of US records), and a range of years.
I put in George Bush, and added the range of years 1940-1960, and my result changed significantly. The most obvious was the addition of 9911 matches from 123 Small Town Papers. You might recall that the initial search result did not include any newspapers. Subtracting 9911 from 10,237 total matches leaves us with a narrowing of results from the 2135 when we used no date range to 246 using the date range.
The number of titles has also been lowered, from 25 to 10.
At this point, the user must choose a title in order to proceed. That’s not a bad thing, because once you choose a title, you can filter (or “narrow”) based on information specific to that title. In the case of WWII Submarine Patrol Reports, for example, You can choose from:
- Last Name
- First Name
- Place
- Year
- Fiche Number
- First Date Month
- First Date Year
- Last Date Month
- Last Date Year
- Month
- Submarine Name
Some of these choices might never be used. It’s basically a list of the “fields” that Footnote keyed for this title, which is often based on how the records were organized BEFORE they were microfilmed.Patrol Reports were grouped by Submarine, and within that grouping, by the range of dates included. Footnote also captured the fiche number when the images were scanned.
Before we choose any fields to refine our search, I should point out that there are only two matches in this title, and they are both listed on the right side of the search result display. I can see that the submarines involved were the Finback and the Becuna. If I take a “quick look” at the Becuna hit, I can see that “Bush” and “George” are not together on the page – that it’s not a “George Bush” match.
This brings up several points worth knowing. First, if you are not a Footnote subscriber, you can still see every search result and every “quick look.” You would be able to narrow this search down to a single result without having to subscribe, and you would know which submarine and range of dates contained the only entry in that title for George HW Bush, when he was shot down in WWII. Second, comparing the information listed on the “quick look” to the list of fields for refining your search can indicate which fields were keyed by Footnote. And third, it helps us understand what a “match” means.
The fields First Name, Place, and Year are not on the list in the quick look. Refining your search with any of these items will behave differently from refining it with the others, such as submarine name.
When searching OCR text, a match means that both words are on the same image. When searching fields that were keyed by Footnote, a match means that both first name and last name are found in the first name and last name fields of that specific record. In an effort to help the user distinguish between the two, Footnote has added a check box to the search result field labeled, “Don’t show matches from OCR (example: newspaper text).” Choosing this option in our search leaves us with only one result, the Finback. The match we found here was an “annotation” of a name, entered by a user on the site. If you are not familiar with annotations at Footnote, it’s worth looking into.
