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How to find information in the United Nations Documents collection
There are 5 ways to find information in this collection:
- search for particular words that appear in the text by clicking the Search button
- browse documents by DATES by clicking the DATES button
- browse documents by CREATORS by clicking the CREATORS button
- browse documents by RECIPIENTS by clicking the RECIPIENTS button
- browse documents by SUBJECT LINE by clicking the SUBJECT LINE button
How to browse the United Nations Documents collection
Click on the DATES tab to browse a chronological listing of all the documents by year and month. All of the documents in the collection are retrievable from the DATES browse list.
Click on the CREATORS, RECIPIENTS, or SUBJECT LINE tabs to see alphabetical listings of the documents' respective creators, recipients, or subject lines. Because some of the documents lack a discernible creator, recipient, or subject line, not all of the documents will be retrievable from each of these three browse lists.
All of entries in the browse lists are preceded either by a "plus sign" icon or a "bullet" icon. Clicking on the "plus sign" icon (or the browse list term following it) displays an expanded list of all the documents for a particular creator, recipient, or subject line entry. To return to the complete browse list, simply click on the "plus sign." Clicking on the "bullet" icon (or the document title following it) retrieves that specific document.
 | Open this bookshelf / Return to the browse list |
 | Open this document and view contents |
Click on the View High Resolution Image link at the bottom of each document to view a 1600 x 2200 pixel image.
How to search the United Nations Documents collection
The documents in the collection were scanned as simple image files and are thus not full-text searchable. However, the descriptive metadata accompanying each document is fully searchable.
From the search page, you make a query in these simple steps:
- Specify what items you want to search
- Say whether you want to search for all or just some of the words
- Type in the words you want to search for
- Click the Begin Search button
When you make a query, the first fifty matching documents will be shown. There is an arrow at the end to take you on to the next fifty documents. From there you will find arrows to take you on to the third fifty or back to the first fifty, and so on. Click the title of any document, or the gray bullet icon beside it, to see it.
A maximum of 1000 is imposed on the number of documents returned. You can change this number by clicking the PREFERENCES button at the top of the page.
Search terms
Whatever you type into the query box is interpreted as a list of words or phrases called "search terms." A term is a single word containing only letters and digits, or a phrase consisting of a sequence of words enclosed in double quotes ("..."). Terms are separated by white space. If any other characters such as punctuation appear, they serve to separate terms just as though they were spaces. And then they are ignored. You can't search for words that include punctuation.
For example, the query
- Security-Council
will be treated the same as
- Security Council
Truncated searching and weighted searching is also available.
- An asterisk (*) at the end of a query term matches all words starting with that word, e.g. unite* matches all words starting with unite.
- /x can be used to give higher weight to one or more of the query terms, eg Dallaire/10 UNAMIR gives Dallaire 10 times more weight than UNAMIR when ranking documents.
Query type
There are two different kinds of queries.
- Queries for all of the words. These look for document metadata that contains all the words you have specified.
Documents that satisfy the query are displayed, in build order.
- Queries for some of the words. Just list some terms that are
likely to appear in the document metadata. Documents are
displayed in order of how closely they match the query. When determining
the degree of match,
- the more search term occurrences document's metadata contains, the closer it matches;
- terms which are rare in the collection as a whole are more important than common ones;
Use as many search terms as you like--a whole sentence, or even a whole paragraph. If you specify only one term, documents will be ordered by its frequency of occurrence in the document's metadata.
Advanced searching
If you have selected advanced query mode (in preferences) you have slightly different search options. Advanced searches use boolean operators. A boolean search allows you to combine terms using & (for "and"), | (for "or"), and ! (for "not"), using parentheses for grouping if desired. The default operator is | (for "or").
For example, Annan & Dallaire will retrieve documents whose metadata contain both Annan AND Dallaire, whereas Annan | Dallaire will retrieve documents whose metadata contain either Annan OR Dallaire. Annan !Dallaire will retrieve documents whose metadata contains Annan AND NOT Dallaire.
The results can be displayed in ranked order, as described for the some search in Query type, or in "natural" (or "build") order. This is the order that documents were processed during the creation of the collection.
Further operators include NEARx and WITHINx. NEARx is used to specify the maximum distance apart (x words) two query terms must be for a document to match. WITHINx specifies that the second term must occur within x words after the first term. This is similar to NEAR but the order is important. The default distance is 20.
NOTE: These operators are all ignored if you are searching in simple query mode.
Fielded searching
Fielded searching provides the opportunity to combine searches across fields. For example, one can search for "Dallaire" in Creators AND "ceasefire" in Subject Line. In simple query mode, each line of the form behaves like a normal single line search. The individual lines of the form are combined using AND (for an "all" search) or OR (for a "some" search). Terms inside the field are also combined the same way. In advanced mode, you can specify different combinations of AND/OR/NOT between the fields using the drop-down lists, and inside a field you can use boolean operators.
Changing your preferences
When you click the PREFERENCES link at the top of the page you will be able to change some features of the interface to suit your own requirements.
Language preferences
Each collection has a default presentation language, but you can switch to a different language if you like. You can also alter the encoding scheme used for output to the browser. You can also switch from the standard graphical interface format to a textual one. This is particularly useful for visually impaired users who use large screen fonts or speech synthesizers for output.
Search preferences
You can switch to an "advanced" query mode which allows you to combine terms using & (for "and"), | (for "or"), and ! (for "not"), using parentheses for grouping if desired. This allows you to specify more precise queries.
You can switch the search type of the collection between "normal" search, and "fielded" search.
- Normal search provides a single query box. It is possible to get a large query box, so that you can easily do paragraph-sized searching. It is surprisingly quick to search for large amounts of text.
- Fielded search provides a number of query boxes, each querying a different field of the index. This enables searching over different fields at once. You can change the number of fields shown in the search form.
A pair of buttons controls whether upper and lower case must match when searching. For example, if "ignore case differences" is selected, UNAMIR will be treated the same as Unamir and unamir.
A pair of buttons controls whether to ignore word endings or not when searching. For example, if "ignore word endings" is selected, demilitarized zone will be treated the same as demilitarized zones and demilitarize zone. This currently only works properly for English language text. It may be more convenient and precise to use the search term truncation facility described above in "Search terms".
A pair of buttons controls whether accented and unaccented letters must match when searching. Because no accents marks were added to the metadata, either select "ignore accents" in the preferences or do not enter them when searching.
You can turn on the search history feature, which shows you your last few queries. This makes it easy to repeat slightly modified versions of previous queries.
Finally, you can control the number of hits returned, and the number presented on each screenful.
