• Home - Finding Information

Finding Information

Searching Northern Ireland: A Divided Community 1921-1972’s vast content would have been a time-consuming task for any individual before Gale introduced Gale Digital Collections. Employing dynamic search functionality that librarians and their patrons worldwide have come to trust — and new technology that identifies subtle differences in the actual text as it appeared in eighteenth century literature — our newest online reference collection allows researchers to find books, text and authors more quickly and accurately. Northern Ireland: A Divided Community 1921-1972 redefines how researchers access a century of the most influential works ever printed.

Searching

Basic Search

Simply type in a term of interest in the entry field and click on the Search button. Basic searches are the broadest and often return the most results. Basic Searches allow users to pinpoint their search by entering either, both or all of the following limiters:

• Date of publication
• Subject

Advanced Search

Researchers will like the Boolean search functionality of the Advanced Search. By combining or excluding search terms, attendees, date, document number, subject, titles and headings, users can pinpoint their searches and have more targeted results than a Keyword Search.

A "fuzzy search" option expands the search to include words similar to search terms entered, thereby accommodating for spelling variations. Think of a fuzzy search in terms of how similar one word is to another. To change a word into another characters can be added, deleted or replaced. A single degree is one change to one character. Two degree is changes to two characters, and so on up to four. The higher the degree, the greater margin of error, presenting the researcher with more results.

Advanced Searches allow users to limit their search by entering any or all of the following limiters:

• Date
• Subject

Search Results

All matching search results are returned as citations. Citations are presented 10 to a page (or more depending on preference). The total number of citations also is noted at the top of the page.

Researchers may click on the citation title to access the work. Digital facsimiles, or images of the book's pages are presented and may be viewed on screen, saved (or marked) for later reference, printed and InfoMarked for future use such as reading lists or directing other researchers to this search.