Florida On Florida is a catalog of digital materials related to Florida. It includes all sorts of items including maps, photographs, postcards, books, and manuscripts. The materials in Florida On Florida come from digital collections held by libraries, archives, museums and historical societies throughout Florida. To see a list of the collections included, go to the Collections page.

Searching

Two searching options are provided in Florida On Florida: Simple search and Advanced search.

Simple search lets you search for a single word or phrase in a specific field of the record.

Advanced search lets you search for combinations of up to two terms or phrases using Boolean connector terms (i.e., AND, OR, NOT).

The specified fields you can choose among are:

Entire record: Search for all the fields in the record that describes the digital material.

Title: Search for titles of books, maps, photographs, postcards, and manuscripts etc., in the title field of the record.

Creator: Search for authors of books, creators of photographs, institutions responsible for a pamphlet, etc., in the author/creator field of the record.

Searching Tips

Search by Author: Author names may be in inverted order or not, so if you don't find appropriate resources using one method, e.g., Eric Eustace Williams, try it inverted, e.g., Williams, Eric Eustace.

Word variations: Use an asterisk(*) with a word stem to find variations on the word, e.g., searching for "work*" will match works, worker, working, etc.

Punctuation: All other punctuation, other than *, will be ignored, e.g., searching for work? will retrieve records containing both work? and work.

Phrase search: If you enter more than one word in a search box, the words will be treated as a phrase and searched together, e.g. entering "alachua county" will find records that have the word "alachua" next to "county" only.

Capitalization: Capitalization is ignored, e.g., Alachua and alachua are searched the same way.

Search Results

There is a search summary box at the top of your search results page which repeats the words you used in your search, tells you how many records you found, and how many matches you found in the records. It also serves as navigation between detailed results for each collection. Simply click on the linked number of records under any collection name to see detailed records for that collection.

Search results will return all of the fields present for a particular record.

Each record can include all or some of the following fields.

Title: The title of a book, a map, a photograph, a postcard, and a manuscript, etc.

Creator: The author of a book, creator of a photograph, etc.

Contributor: An additional author, creator, institution, etc. Contributors can be editors, illustrators, etc.

Publisher: Where the resource was originally published.

Publication Date: The year the resource was originally published.

Type: The type of resource, e.g., "text," "image."

Format: The particular format of a resource type, e.g., if the resource type is "text," the resource format may be "HTML."

Language: The language(s) the resource was originally written or spoken in.

Note: Any information that doesn't fit into other fields is generally placed in a note. This field may provide information on table of contents, history and related information. Subject: The subjects that have been used to describe the topical nature of a resource by a resource publisher.

URL: The link that takes you to the resource itself.

Availability: The access and copyright information for the resource, as determined by the institution that manages the collection.

Collection: The record is contributed and managed by a collection. View a list of the collections that Florida On Florida harvests their records from.

Sorting and Sort Thresholds

By default, records are sorted by author, last name first. If there is no author, the results are sorted alphabetically by title. For results sets up to 1000 records, you may change the sort to a chronological or reverse chronological sort by using the pull down menu in the upper right-hand corner of your results screen. This feature will not work with results sets larger than 1000 records. If you have more than 1000 records in your result sec tion you will see a message that says "threshold exceeded" in place of the sort menu.

Entering dates

You may limit your search to a date range of your choice. The default values displayed in the date boxes in the search screen reflect the maximum date range for the databaes you are searching. The form will not allow you to replace these with dates o utside of this range. You may, however, replace these with dates reflecting a smaller range of years. For example, if the database contains citations for items published between 1800 and 1900, you would not be able to search for anything from 1950. You could search for items published between 1850 and 1860 (for example) by replacing the default values in the date boxes.

Wildcard Searches

This system searches exactly for what you type. 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.

Downloading and emailing records

You may save records and either email them to yourself or download them as an html file.

To save records: Click on the "add to bookbag" link following the record.  Your bookbag will stay with you for a period of time, usually
at least 2 hours.  You can do different searches and continue to add to the bookbag. The bookbag can hold up to 500 records. You may view your bookbag at any time by clicking on the "view bookbag" link in the navigation bar at the top of the main window.

Clear your bookbag at anytime by viewing the my items and then clicking on the "erase my items" button.

To email your saved records: Click on the "email records" button. You will be presented with a form that asks for your email address. Simply fill it in and then click on the "email records" button.

To download your saved records: Click on the "download records" button. The records will be downloaded to your browser
as plain text.  If you browser has a helper application configured for plain text the record will appear in the helper application otherwise it will appear in the main window of your browser.

Records will be emailed or downloaded in the long  display format.

Short and long displays

On both the results screens and on the my items you have the option of viewing a short or long display of records. The default is a short view. The short view is the author, title and citation (publishing information). The long display is the full bibliographic record and contains whatever information is available in the database (such as subjects, notes, holdings).