Is there a way of refining the search results to show only certain things, like they do on Trove, and the British newspapers.
EG if you only want BMDs to show, not all the adverts and other results.
Trove has it as 'Public Notices' I think and BNA 'People'
Thanks
Ian C
Hi Ian, there's a few different ways to go about this. Firstly, our content types (article, advertisement, illustration) are a bit more coarse than Trove or British Newspapers, but do note that they can be selected independent of each other.
However, I think you'll get much better mileage out of well thought-out keyword searches across all content types, because this way you'll get the results you want irrespective of whether the content types have been mis-indexed or not. So instead of thinking of content types, think of the key words that would have appeared on the item you are looking for (eg, search for "Richard Jones rest peace" in a relevant date range for the notice).
Also, don't be afraid to use a few well-chosen boolean operators! Eg,
Richard Jones -world +peace +rest
- would be a good term to use if that first search query happened to bring back extraneous results relating to "world peace".
You can also combine ALL WORD searches with PHRASE searches by using speechmarks on an all words search - eg:
Richard Jones "rest in peace"
- This can get you to a result very quickly, especially if combined with a date bracket, even one spanning several months. Essentially all of this means that you might not browse BDM stuff in Papers Past as much; instead, you do very specific searches for specific deaths.
As an aside, sometimes on Papers Past, while classifieds/BDM notices often end up in the "Article" category, sometimes you'll see classifieds and BDM notices in the "Advertisement" category. Often this is because you've got a large vertical column of stuff that mixes ads, classifieds, and BDM notices, and it can be ambiguous to our indexing/descriptive work. This means the BDM stuff isn't necessarily all in the one place unfortunately, so I strongly recommend using keywords instead. If you get stuck, just reply here and I'll help you out :-)
