| Subject search allows you to search for material about particular topic, place or person. Every record in the catalogue has headings which describe what the material is about. The results page for a Subject search will display matching headings and indicate the number of records linked under each heading. Click on the desired heading to see the records linked to it. Subject indexing aims to use a set of standard terms to simplify searching. The result screen may refer you from your search term to the heading that is used in the catalogue. You may also be guided to broader, narrower and related terms. Select keywords or phrase: You can choose a Keywords or Phrase search by selecting the appropriate radio button. A keywords search will return any record containing your search terms. The keywords may appear together or separately, anywhere in the record. A phrase search looks for your search words together in the order you entered them. For example, macquarie harbour as a keywords search finds Boat Harbour (Macquarie Island) and Macquarie Harbour (Tas.). macquarie harbour as a phrase search finds Macquarie Harbour (Tas.), but not Boat Harbour (Macquarie Island). Subject search looks for your search terms in fields called Topic, Name, Place, and LC Subject. Subject search will look for your search terms in all four of these fields by default. You can use the drop-down box to limit your search to a particular field. | |
| Topic | Topic headings are used to describe what is depicted in an image. The terms used as Topic headings are based on the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus (APT). The APT is a collection of terms for indexing Australian images using contemporary Australian terminology. |
| Name | Name search looks for a name as a subject — where there is something about a particular person, for example. Other types of name indexed in the Name field are organisations, families, events (such as a conference, prize, or race), ships, racehorses, and fictional characters. |
| Place | Place search lets you find material about a particular place – for example, a town, street, building, or natural feature. New South Wales places are indexed in more detail than other Australian or non-Australian places. |
| LC Subject | LC Subject search uses Library of Congress Subject Headings, an internationally accepted list of subjects. The LC Subject field is usually used to describe the overall subject of a collection (e.g. Authors, Australian -- 20th century -- Correspondence). This allows you to search for collections about a general concept – for example, New South Wales -- Economic conditions -- 1788-1851. |