Help with help: In frames-capable browsers this help page is in a separate window. If you can't find MOA, it's probably in a window right behind this one.

• tips for beginners
• difference between search and browse
• searching: what type of search to choose
• searching: narrowing your search
• searching: simple searches
• advanced searching: bibliographic searches
• advanced searching: Boolean searches
• advanced searching: precedence of Boolean operators
• advanced searching: frequency searches
• advanced searching: proximity searches
• advanced searching: index searches
• searching: understanding results
• browsing: browse the journals
• browsing: browsable bibliographies
• bibliographic citations
• OCR text vs page images
• viewing and navigating a text
• printing a text
• MOA FAQ

Tips for beginners:

There a few things you might want to remember to help making using the features of MOA easier.

• Many of the search forms have options that are available on pull-down menus. Put your mouse on the box and hold down the mouse button to see your choices. Then select a choice. For example, if you wish to limit your search to certain years, you need to pull down the year menu and select a choice.
• In all the advanced searches, you have to push the submit button to make the search work. Hitting the enter key is not enough. Move your mouse to the button and click.
• In a search form with more than one box you have to fill out the first box. Otherwise your search will not return any results.
• Truncation is not automatic To search variations and the plural of a word, include an asterisk * at the end of the word. For example, war*, will look for wars, warrior, warm and so forth. The simple term war will look only for the word war.
• Although MOA has titles published between 1800 and 1925, the bulk of the collection is from 1850-1877. You may want to look at a graph of MOA Titles by Year to get a better idea of the date distribution.
• If you can't find the 19th century American text you want -- especially the work of some of the more famous authors, try the Modern English Collection and the American Verse Project, both available from the University of Michigan's Humanities Text Initiative.

Difference between search and browse

Searching:

• locates books and journal articles that contain information you have specified -- such as certain words in the title or text or an author's name
• returns a list of the articles that contain that information

Browsing

• presents a list of the journal titles available in Making of America. You can look at issues of those journals, organized by date. Using this browse feature is a bit like the process of leafing through paper journals.
• presents a hyper-linked bibliography of the books organized alphabetically by author and journal articles organized alphabetically by title.

Searching: what type of search to choose

• Simple searches are good for casting the broadest possible net for a word or term. On common words this may find a very large number of articles. You may then wish to modify your search by doing an advanced search.
• Bibliographic searches are useful for quickly locating items with a known title or author. You may also search using a known subject heading or for a keyword anywhere in the bibliographic citation (so you could also search for items from a particular publisher or all the works published in Boston in 1866).
• Boolean searches allow you to combine up to four search terms and look for them in the same page or work.
• Frequency searches allow you to specify the number of times you wou would like a search term to appear in a work. This is good for helping to find items with a strong concentration on your subject.
• Proximity searches look for the co-occurrence of search terms. This allows you to specify the physical relationship between the words you are looking for -- so you can look for words following each other or near each other.
• Index searches allow you to look through alphabetical linked lists of authors' names, titles, or subject headings.

Searching: narrowing your search

On any advanced search you can narrow your search by restricting by date or type of text.

• To restrict by date, pull down the date menus and select the year range to search. The smallest range is a five year period. If you do not choose a range, you will be looking in the entire collection.
• To restrict by type of text choose "search books only" or "search journals only." If you do not choose a type of text, you will be looking in the entire collection.
• These restrictions may both be used at the same time.

Searching: simple searches

A simple search is quick and easy. Enter a word or phrase including an author's name; the search looks for it anywhere in any of our texts. You can specify whether you would like to look in just books, just journal articles, or both.

Advanced searching: Bibliographic searches

Bibliographic searches are useful for quickly locating items with a known title or author. You may also search using a known subject heading or for a keyword anywhere in the bibliographic citation .

For example:

• You want to find all the works in MOA by members of the Alcott family.
  1. Enter Alcott in the text box.
  2. Select Author from the pull-down menu.
  3. Press the submit button.
  Your results will list all works written by authors who have Alcott somewhere in their names.
• You are interested in all the works published in New York in 1870.
  1. Enter New York in the text box.
  2. Select citation from the pull-down menu.
  3. Choose the boolean operator And from the pull-down menu of operators.
  4. Enter 1870 in the next text box
  5. Select citation from the pull-down menu.
  6. Press the submit button
  Your results may contain some false matches if the words New York and 1870 appear in other parts of the citation (such as the title), but most will match your desired critieria.

Advanced searching: Boolean searches

Boolean searching allows you to combine up to four search terms.

For example:

• submitting a query for "farming" will result in a full-text search for all works in the MOA database in which that term occurs.
• if the term "garden" was "Anded" to the previous example search, the search would be limited to works in which both "farming" and "garden" appeared somewhere in the text.

Same page or work option

• allows you to broaden or narrow your Boolean search.
• Same page looks for your terms where they all appear on the same page.
• Same work looks for the terms anywhere in the work.

Precedence of Boolean Operators

Boolean expressions are operated on from left to right. This means that you will need to take some care in formulating your search.

For example:You wish to find any texts that mention the word mother AND either the words honor OR duty.

Your search should be formulated as: honor OR duty AND mother.

Understanding the results:

• Since the search works from left to right, the search will first look for the set of texts that contains EITHER honor or duty.
• Then the search will look within that set of texts for the ones that also mention mother.
• Those texts will be your results set.

• Since the search works from left to right, the search would have first looked for the set of texts that contains BOTH the words mother and honor.
• Next it would have looked for the texts that contain the word duty.
• Then it would combine those two sets of results and eliminated the duplicates to give you your results.
• This means you would have a whole set of texts that contained duty but make no mention of mother.

Advanced searching: frequency searches

Frequency searching allows you to specify the number of times a search term appears in a given work

For example: if you want only those texts in MOA in which the terms "agriculture" appears at least 15 times (thus increasing the chances that the work is really about agriculture and doesn't just mention it in passing) enter 15 in the text box. Then press the submit button. You will get back a list of items that contain the word "agriculture" at least 15 times.

• You may also apply boolean operators to combine multiple search terms, specifying the number of times each must appear.
• You may also apply date restrictions to your search or search only in books or only in journal articles.

Advanced searching: proximity searches

Proximity searching looks for the co-occurrence of search terms.

• You can look for words or phrases within 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25 words..
• You can find places where one term is followed by another.
• You can look for places where words are Not Near and Not Followed By other words.

For example:

• if you want only those texts in MOA in which the terms "buttermilk" and "waffle" appeared relatively near each other, search those terms within 5-25 words (so this might find articles where the use of buttermilk in the making of waffles is discussed).
• to find those terms only when one follows another select the proximity operator "Followed By". "Buttermilk" followed by "waffle" would help you locate only those articles directly concerned with buttermilk waffles.
• to find all occurrences of a term when it is not followed by another closely associated term, you may use the proximity operators "Not Near" or "Not Followed By". For instance, if you were only interested in buttermilk, a search for the term "buttermilk Not Near waffle" would yield all occurrences of "buttermilk" when not directly referring to "waffle."

Advanced searching: index searching

Index searching allows you to look through lists by Author, Title, or Subject.

To do an index search,:

1. select a category from the pull-down menu
2. enter the desired author's last name, title, subject heading or a portion thereof in the adjacent box
3. submit your terms to the database by clicking the "search" button
4. The database will return a list of names, titles, or subjects that fall within range of your index term(s). The author's name, title,or subject that most closely matches your search will be highlighted. You may have to scroll to find it.

Searching: understanding results

• Your search results are returned in an alphabetized list.
• The title is a hyperlink to the bibliographic citation for that article or book.
• Each result indicates density by telling you how many matches are found on what number of pages and how many pages are in the entire work. For example: 5 matches on 3 of 15 pages indicates that your term or combination of term appear five times in a total of three pages in a text that is 15 pages long.

Browsing: browse the journals

You may look through the journals by individual journal title. The browse page includes a title list of the 22 journals available in Cornell University's MOA collection.

• Click on the title to bring up a list of years in which that journal was published. MOA contains the complete 19th century runs of these journals, so if years are missing, it is probably due to the intricacies of 19th Century publishing and the Civil War.
• Click on a year to bring up a list of issues available for that year.
• Click on an issue to see a hyperlinked table of contents for that issue.
• Click on an article title to see an individual article.

Browsing: the bibliography

You can also browse through a bibliography of journal articles and and books (organized alphabetically by author's last name or by title if there is no author).

• Use the alphabet links to jump to a desired section of the alphabet.
• Use the guide view to select the desired alphabetical range (i.e. Jenkins, H.D. -- Jenna, Marie).
• To then locate a particular name or title word, use your browser's find command to search that section of the bibliography.
• The bibliography allows you to view thirty citations at a time. Use previous and next to move on to the thirty titles on either side of the section you are viewing.
• All titles are hyperlinked to the article or book.
• In the near future we will provide separate bibliographies of journal articles and books as well as the combined bibliography.
• If you are searching for a known item, you may want to also consider using the bibliographic search.

OCR text vs page images

The MOA materials have been encoded in a simple SGML form (a 40 element DTD conforming to the TEI Guidelines). This data includes the document text from the OCR process. Many users have asked if they can have access to the plain, uncorrected OCR text. We believe that in most cases people will still want to look at the page images of the books and journals, but have decided to make the text available to users so thet can save it, cut and paste, and to use the "find" feature on their Web browsers to locate a word on a page. We think that this will be of benefit to our users.

If you want to view the plain text, there are a couple of ways to accomplish this:

Page by page viewing: Go to the desired page and choose "view as text" from the view as menu in the toolbar at the top. As you move forward or back in the work, you will continue paging through plain text until you choose another "view as" option (such as 75% or thumbnail).

Entire books or journal issues: You may choose to view an entire book or journal issue in plain text. When you click on the download link, you will be presented with a dialog box that gives you the option of saving the file. By default, the file will be saved as HTML, which can be viewed with a web browser (text will not be broken up by line or page -- it is one large block of text). You can also change the file extension to .txt to save as text for viewing with a text editor or word processor (this preserves line and page breaks).

Please be aware that some of thesetexts are as long as 1,000 pages and will take a long time to download, particularly over a modem. Such a large download may also crash your Web browser.

Bibliographic citations:

The bibliographic citations for books are similar to standard library catalog record, but have the advantages of hypertext including:

• author: clicking on this link will bring up the author index to the MOA collection. The author's name will be highlighted. Scroll to the author's name, click the "ok" button and you will get a list of other works by that author.
• subjects: will bring up the subject index to the MOA collection. The selected subject will be highlighted. Scroll to the subject, or choose other nearby subjects, click the "ok" button and you will get a list of other titles in the collection to which the same subject headings have been assigned.
• bookmarkable url: this is a persistent url for this volume. If you think you will be returning to this volume and wish to use your browser to bookmark the text click on this link first and then make your bookmark

Navigating and viewing a text

When you begin to view an article or book, you will also see a separate navigation frame at the top of your browser that looks like this (without the number labels).

This is what the various parts mean

1. Previous page: Click on this icon. It goes to the previous page of the text.
2. Page #: indicates the number of the page you are viewing and the total number of pages in the text
3. Next page: Click on this icon. It goes to the next page of the text.
4. View As: sets the size of the image you are viewing. If you have a smaller monitor you might want to choose a low percentage. The percentages are in a pull down menu. Select the size you want. The size you choose will stay in effect until you change it or end your session. Other options on this menu include:
   • PDF (best for printing, not viewing)
   • text Allows you to view the raw OCR text or (if available) the proofed and encoded text.
   • Thumbnail Provides thumbnail views of 20 pages of the text at a time. Useful for quickly spotting pages with graphical content
5. Go to Page #: Jumps to a desired page that you enter in the box. Especially handy for moving from a table of contents to a section of a book or journal. "Go to page #" is a button and must be clicked on to jump to the desired page.
6. Go To: jumps to special purpose pages such as title pages, tables of contents, and lists of illustrations. The special pages are listed in a pull down menu. Select the page you want to view. Not all texts will contain the same choices.
7. Navigation links: Links to other parts of the MOA.

Printing a text

• The best way to print is to use the PDF option. This option is offered on the "view as" pulldown menu. To use PDF, you will need the Adobe Acrobat viewer. This is available for free from Adobe.
• To print using PDF:
  1. select PDF from the "view as" options (don't forget to click on the button)
  2. When the image opens in Acrobat, click on the printer icon on the far right of the toolbar
• Texts in the MOA can only be printed page by page
• If you print directly from your browser, texts will print at the size of the image you are viewing (100%. 75%, etc)
• You will need to calculate maximum clarity against fitting a page on a standard piece of paper when you decide what size image to print. 25% may be unreadable. 100% may not fit on a standard printer's paper.