The Search Standard

Searching for items in a collection in pre-computer days had to be done either by searching the physical objects or by searching an index in a document or on physical cards in drawers. In the computer age, however, searching is now a largely intellectual process, understood and undertaken by the majority of the world’s human population. It has become so because of the ubiquity of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the search engines that we use to access it. When we search collections other than the WWW, we apply the concepts we are familiar with when we use a search engine – we put in some keywords and expect to get a list of all relevant hits; and, indeed, computer technology enables us to do just that when we search our digital indexes. My indexes for the Publications, Reports, and Trophies & Certificates collections are in the Word application in which the Control-F function will identify all occurrences of the number, word or phrase I specify. Most of my other indexes, including those for Photos & Videos, Books, and Mementos, are in Excel in which Control-F will  take me to each occurrence of the specified search term as well as producing a list of all occurrences. In both Word and Excel indexes, I can choose to either search the whole of the index, or just a selected part of it; and Excel provides the additional search facility of a filter applied to a particular column. The filter shows all different occurrences within the column and enables you to select which you want to be shown in the filtered spreadsheet. I use filters a lot when searching my Excel indexes.

My PAWDOC and Loft collections use rather more specialised functionality for their indexes. The PAWDOC index is in a sophisticated database application called Filemaker which enables not only simple searches of words or phrases but also more complex functionality such as Boolean searching (AND, OR, NOT logic), and searching by date and date ranges. The index for my Loft collection is held in a specially built phone app which enables searching for numbers, words or phrases, and which produces a list of the results.

I regularly use all this functionality to search my indexes; but that is not the only way I conduct searches. Computers can also conduct searches on filenames, and this too is a powerful way of finding digital objects. It is one of the reasons why I try to always define readable and informative file titles. When conducting searches on files, computers can also search on any text that it recognises within the files themselves. My Windows PC understands and searches the textual content of Word, Excel and PDF files (though it doesn’t understand images so the contents of scanned documents cannot be searched unless they have been turned into text via Optical Character Recognition software).

The flexibility, speed and overall effectiveness of the computer’s ability to search, means that the size of an index or the number of objects being searched is no longer a constraint. For the relatively small collections owned by individuals, it is just as quick and easy to conduct searches across combined collections as it is to search within collections; indeed, its generally easier if there is just one place to go to conduct searches on many different types of collection. Of course, if this tends to produce an unmanageable number of hits then that is less productive. The only collection this has become an issue for me is PAWDOC which is managing over 27,000 diverse items in an index of some 17,000 entries which has been compiled over 40 years. Sometimes I have to conduct several searches in PAWDOC to find what I want. However, for the small-scale collections belonging to many Amateur Collectors this is unlikely to be a problem.

The ability to improve the ease and speed of searching is a good reason to have a single index for multiple collections, or to store digital objects from different collections in an overall, higher-level folder.

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