How do I use the cross-archive search in the interview portal?

(Video in preparation)

• In the cross-archival search, you will find individual interviews from various archives.
• The filter facets such as collection, gender, or year of birth can be combined with each other. Within a filter facet, you can use the magnifying glass to search for a suitable term.
• You can only use the full-text search if you are registered within Oral-History.Digital. It only covers the archives for which you have access and in which transcripts are available. 
• Individual archives offer additional filter facets, a map, or a register search.

Displaying search results

• The grid view displays the interviews found with preview images (if available).
• The list view displays further information about the interviews in an overview.
• The lock icon indicates that you must first be granted access to the archive for this interview. 
• Under “Sorting”, you can sort the interviews found by name, interview ID, duration, collection, language, media type, or random.
• By default, interviews are sorted by relevance after a full-text search. This relevance refers to the frequency of the search term in relation to the total length of the transcript.

Filter facets

• The following filter facets can be combined with each other and with the full-text search.
• If you click on several entries in different filters, e.g., Media type: Audio and Gender: Female, the filter is restricted, meaning fewer results are displayed.
• If you click on several entries within a filter, e.g., Language: German and Language: English, the filter is expanded, meaning that more results are displayed.

The individual filters

• Archive: All archives available in Oral-History.Digital. You may need to apply for access to individual archives, which will then apply to all collections within that archive.
• Collection: All collections or individual holdings belonging to the individual archives. Clicking on the arrow at the end of the line takes you to the collection description in the Oral-History.Digital catalog. Within the long alphabetical list, you can use the magnifying glass to search for a suitable term. You can also use the “Topic (BETA)” filter.
• Gender: Gender of the interviewee. Click on one or more options.
• Year of birth: Year in which the interviewees were born. Use the slider to select specific time periods.
• Language: Interviews in over 25 languages. Select one or more options. Some interviews are multilingual. Translations are also available for some interviews.
• Media type: Audio or video. Select one or more options.
• Degree of accessibility: Stage of development of the interviews in Oral-History.Digital. If only metadata is available, the interview can be viewed on site in the respective archive. Most interviews have media files and transcripts, but some are missing one of the two. In some cases, there are additional documents and photos as well as translations into German or other languages.
• Topic (BETA): Broad keywords for categorizing the interview collections by topic. The life story interviews always touch on numerous other topics that are often not covered here. Individual archives have more precise thematic filters and registers. Within the long alphabetical list, you can use the magnifying glass to search for a suitable term. You can also use the “Collections” filter.
• Country (BETA): Rough identification of the countries mentioned by interviewees. The life story interviews always touch on numerous places that are often not recorded here. A cross-archive location index with map view is in preparation. This is already available in some archives. You can search for a suitable term within the long alphabetical list using the magnifying glass.

Full-text search – General

• You can only use the full-text search if you are registered with Oral-History.Digital.
• It only covers the archives that you have been granted access to and that contain transcripts. 
• If you want to start a new search, first click on the “Reset” button directly below the search field.
• With “Save search” in the upper left corner, you can save your search entries in your personal workbook.
• The full-text search searches the transcripts, translations, tables of contents, names of interviewees and contributors, short biographies, photo captions, keywords or index entries, and annotations.
• By default, interviews are sorted by relevance after a full-text search. This relevance refers to the frequency of the search term in relation to the total length of the transcript.

Full-text search – tips

• You do not need to enter capital letters or special characters. Searching for “cafe” will also find “café,” and searching for ‘Russia’ will also find “Russland” (and vice versa).

•  You can use wildcards to search for words with different spellings. These can be placed at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a word.

  • The asterisk * replaces any number of characters. Example: use* finds user, used, use- value

  • The question mark ? replaces a single character: Example: use? finds used, but not userfriendly

• The phrase search with quotation marks only finds words in exactly this order.
• The following Boolean operators must always be written in capital letters.
  
  
  • AND (also &):The search for Max AND Mustermann finds hits in which both search terms occur within a segment, a person, a photo caption, etc.
  • OR (also ||)):When searching for Max OR Mustermann, one or both terms may occur. This is suitable for searching with synonyms or in different languages.

  • NOT (also !): When searching for Max NOT Mustermann, the second term is excluded.

  • If no operators are used, the terms are automatically combined with AND.
• Please note: Stem reduction allows different declensions of a word to be found. This process currently works best for the German language and is still under development.

Full-text search - Go directly to the interview passage

• The number of search results within a single interview is displayed at the top right of the preview image (grid view) or on the right in the list view.
•  In grid view, clicking on this number allows you to display the transcript passages found, which you can scroll through using the arrows.
• Clicking on one of these text passages takes you directly to that sentence in the interview.
• Clicking on the photo or name of the interviewee, on the other hand, takes you to the beginning of the interview.