Searching and browsing the contents of Fenno-ugrica

Browsing
It is possible to browse the documents in the order of date, creator, title or subject heading. The links to the browsing function is found in the menu at the right on the Fenno-ugrica front page. If you want to browse only one archival collection at a time, first choose the page of the archive in question and proceed to the desired browsing method from there. Browsing from the front page will cover all the documents included in Fenno-ugrica.

Searching
A query can also be aimed at a certain archival collection or at all the contents of Fenno-ugrica. To search a certain archival collection, first choose the page of the archive in question. Queries do not distinguish between capital and lowercase letters. There are several search options:

Keyword- or phrase-queries
In case several words are used in the query all of these words must occur in the document. The search can be narrowed using the + and -. Words ensuing a + must occur in the document, words ensuing a - must not occur. Words or phrases entered in quotation marks must occur in the exact wording in documents.

Example: “titanic” +shipping -education

The phrase “titanic” will find documents that match the phrase exactly. In addition the word “shipping” ought to occur in these documents whereas the word “education” must not occur. Naturally queries can also be performed without using + or - signs.

Boolean queries
The logical operators AND, OR and NOT can be used in queries. Please observe that these operators must be written with capital letters.

Example: operation OR editing NOT patient

Either the word operation or editing must occur, but not patient. ’operation AND editing’ would mean that both words must occur.

Field queries
Queries can be aimed at certain metadata fields. Searchable metadata fields are creator, keyword, title, and date.

Example: creator:ståhlberg AND date:1922

Wild card-queries (joker signs)
It is possible to perform queries also with incomplete words or phrases. A single letter can be replaced with a question mark (?), several letters with an asterisk (*).

Fuzzy logic
When there is uncertainty as to how a word is spelled or a word has different spelling alternatives, a tilde-sign (~) can be put at the end of the search term, e.g. Ougadapougou~

Proximity search
In case it is important to find documents where the query terms are next to or close to each other it is possible to use the tilde-sign (~) like this:

Example: “car reparation”~5

The search engine will look for matches that contain the words “car” and “reparation” at a maximum distance of 5 letters from each other.

Relevance-queries
The relevance of one search term can be emphasized by using the ^-sign and adding a number to state the degree of relevance. 5 denotes the highest relevance.

Example: exercise^5health^2condition

This query emphasizes exercise above all, health to a certain extent and condition only marginally.

Advanced search
This function enables searching specified fields and using Boolean operators as required. Choose the field to be searched by clicking on that field.