Help
Hints and Tips for Searching:
Not all of the collections held by all the contributing repositories are included on this catalogue. If you cannot find the collection you are looking for please contact the archive directly.
The search box on the home page (top right) performs an 'any text' search. This will return results if your search term is found anywhere in the catalogue. This could therefore give too many results. Please try narrowing your search by clicking Advanced Search.
To narrow searches use the advanced search function. This allows you to specify title, reference number, category, place held or user tag.
We are working on the Browse page. You can use the advanced search function and select a category, a repository (held by) or just pop any text in that box and press search.
The 'hide sidebar' icon (bottom left of your results) hides the search box to give more room on screen for you to browse your results
Date searching: this is currently a text only function. We are working to improve the functionality of this.
Returning to your results: if you use the browser back button this will only return you to the initial search page not your results page. To return to your search results use the 'list' icon in the top right hand corner of the screen.
The 'list' icon (top right hand of the screen after a search has been performed) will return you to the full list of your results.
The 'lightbox' icon (top right hand of the screen after a search has been performed) shows your full results list in a larger icon format (great if you are scanning through images).
The 'details' icon (in the top right hand of the screen after a search has been performed) will take you to a detailed description of an item. To get back to your results list from this view press the 'list' icon.
The 'view full collection' icon (in the top right hand of the screen after a search has been performed) will allow you to view the 'tree' of a whole collection i.e. a hierarchical view of all the records held for St. Mary's Church, Oldham or Withington Workhouse.
If in the refine search box (to the left) a search returns the error message 'Too many results to perform facets' it means that there is too much data to use the refine search tools or show the collection tree. There needs to be under 5,000 results for this function to work. It is worth reviewing your initial search and making it more specific or you could browse the results instead.
Ways to restrict number of results returned:
If you know where a collection is held i.e. Wigan Archive Service select this in the Held by box in the advanced search.
If you are only looking for a specific type of item use the category selection to narrow the search i.e. Photograph
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