It’s no secret that BROWSE on Footnote can be problematic. One of the problems is “fan” – how many options you have to go through to find what you need. We page them 12 at a time, and 100 isn’t bad, but 200,000 is ridiculous.

Well, the “new search” works as a terrific “new browse” in my experience. I can use the narrowing feature to “winnow” the search results in a variety of helpful ways. And every once in a while, you find an image using “new search” and want to get back to BROWSE.

There is a shortcut. In the examples below, if you click on the thumbnails, you can see a larger image.

Let’s say that you are looking at this page in the viewer:

and you want to get to that same document in a BROWSE context.

If you look at the screen between the image and the filmstrip, you will see a “breadcrumb” – a “browse path” to the document:

Click in the breadcrumb, and you can jump to BROWSE at whichever level you click. You’ll see something like:

Note that in this example, you can click on one of three different levels, separated by chevrons (>>). They are “FBI Case Files,” “Old German Files 1909-1921,” and “Frederick August Stock.”

The FBI Case Files are one of the more difficult browses. You might find the same kind of trick helpful when using city directories, naturalizations, or newspapers. Using this trick, you can start a search with NEW SEARCH, and widen it with BROWSE.

Good luck, and happy browsing.