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Quotation marks

Use quotation marks to find words that must appear adjacent to each other, e.g. "raising of the standard". Otherwise the search results will include the words raising, of, the and standard, but not necessarily in that order. The words may appear anywhere, and in any order, within the document.

Capitalization

Use appropriate capitalization – capitalize proper nouns, and note that lower-case words will match any case. For example, typing poor will return all documents containing the words poor, Poor and POOR. Typing Poor, however, will instruct the search engine to look for only the capitalized word.

Plus (+) and minus (-) signs

Use a plus sign when your search term or phrase must appear in the search results. Use a minus sign to indicate undesirable terms. Please note that a phrase must be contained within quotation marks and remember to leave no spaces between the plus or minus sign and the term. For example, +villa +"Mansfield Woodhouse", will return references to the Roman villa site at Mansfield Woodhouse; +villa -Oldcotes, on the other hand, will find documents containing information about Roman villas but exclude any that refer to the villa at Oldcotes.

Wildcards

Wildcard searches can expand the number of matches for a particular request. The * (asterisk) character is used as the wildcard character. For example, searching for archaeo* will find the words archaeology, archaeological, archaeologist and Archaeologia.

Searching for *ham* will find the words Nottinghamshire, Nottingham, Bingham, Collingham, etc.