Hints for using the Search capability

 

Use browse and search for different needs

Clicking on "Browse" in the sidebar leads to a listing of entries by Holding Institution. The pull-down menu lists all Holding Institutions in the database; clicking on "All Institutions" gives access to al the entries. The Holding Institution is the museum or monument or collection where the sculpture or masonry or quarry sample is located. The list accessed by "Browse" is useful when you want to get an idea of the range of examples from a particular church or museum. At times it will be helpful for finding particular pieces as well.

 

The Search function finds data in all fields, not just the Holding institution field. Use Search to locate a single type, such as Virgin. If you know the specific museum accession number of a piece, you can search on that, even without entering the name of the museum. It is also possible to search on the name of a particular author, and find all the sculpture included in that person's bibliography.

 

Search within Searches

If you search a term and it yields too many matches, you can search within that result by simply adding another search term. (Example: searching on Metropolitan* yields 245 results, 25 pages of results. Adding the term "Virgin" gives 30 results, 3 pages.

 

It is also possible to use two or more terms in the Search from the start. Example: Chicago Head or Metropolitan head king. The order is irrelevant.

 

Omit parentheses and colons

Searching for
    Impost (fragment)
shows "No results found", even when that appears in the object description. Instead, search for
    Impost fragment

Similarly, do not use a colon (:) in the search box.

 

Use an asterisk to get more results

Normally, searches identify only whole words that match the text being searched for.  Including an asterisk tells the search to identify words with other characters in addition to the text being searched for.  For example, there are many occurrences of
    St-Guilhem-le-Désert
in the database. But these will not be found by searching for
    Guilhem
because "Guilhem" is only part of the word "St-Guilhem-le-Désert".  However, searching for
    *Guilhem*
will find the expected text.

 

This is helpful when searching for the identifier by which an object is known to the institution that holds it, since these identifiers are presented in slightly differing formats. For example, searching for
    smc
fails to display sample LF1991, even though that sample is identified as
    SMC22 (98-83)
because "SMC" is only part of a "word" in the identifier.  Instead, search for
    smc*
which finds many identifiers that start with "SMC".

 

Diacritical marks don't matter

Searching for either
    Musée
or

    Musee
will find text like
    Musée Ochier

 

Downloading the database may help understanding it

You can review all the data in spreadsheet form. This allows one to see all the values simultaneously, without navigating web pages.