Keyword Search
With over 80,000 individual items stored in The Preserve, keyword searching is the best way to discover material relevant to your research interests. Keyword searching looks in several areas including an item's title, description, subject headings, and in the text of the item itself. A keyword search can be initiated from the header menu at the top of every site page.
The same search is available on the homepage of The Preserve
By default, this search method will include all of the material in the entire repository. Searches can use boolean logic, so you can use AND, OR, and NOT to combine or exclude individual terms within a single search. You can also put quotation marks around phrases to search specific combinations of words. By default, multiple word searches are inclusive, meaning every item that includes any of the search terms will be returned.
Using Facets to Refine Your Search
Searches can result in thousands of relevant objects and can be further refined using filters and facets. For example, searching "Asa Packer" to find material related to Lehigh University's founder returns nearly 2,000 results. The volume of results can be overwhelming and browsing through several pages to find a single object is not efficient. Filtering options are located to the left side of the results.
The following filter options are available:
- Sub-Collections- Groupings of material curated by library staff
- Contributor- People or organizations involved in the creation of items
- Material Type- Broad categories describing all types of materials
- Media Type- The file format of the original uploaded item
- Model- The type of display used of each item
- Date Created- When an item was originally created
- Publisher- People or organizations involved in the publication of items
- Genre- Descriptive terms about the type of an item
- Subject (Geographic)- Locations associated with the content of an item
- Subject (Name)- People or corporations associated with the content of an item
- Subject (Topical)- Topics associated with the content of an item
As not every item is described in the same way, so these filters may exclude relevant materials or include unrelated items.
Searching Within an Object
When using keyword searching, items that have embedded text or have had optical character recognition run on them can have their contents searched. When you click into an object that has searchable text, your search term will automatically be applied and you will see where in the item your term appears.
If an object contains searchable text, then you can access the search function by clicking on the hamburger menu in the top left of the image viewer and then clicking on the magnifying glass icon. If you search term is present in the object then the results will appear in a list below the search box, with a page indicator and a contextual snippet of text that appears around the search term. After selecting a search result, the viewer will bring you to the indicated page and highlight the search term for improved visibility.