Searching Your Archive
The Archiver's search system lets you find anything across your entire archive — including the text inside scanned documents.
Opening search
Click Search in the left sidebar, or press the magnifying glass icon in the top bar for a quick search.
Basic search
Type any word or phrase in the search box and press Enter. The Archiver searches:
- File titles and descriptions
- All metadata (people, places, subjects, document types)
- Full text of documents (including OCR text from scanned images)
- Transcripts of audio and video files
- Custom field values
Results appear instantly and are ranked by relevance.
Filters
Use the filter panel on the left to narrow your results:
| Filter | What it does |
|---|---|
| Date range | Show only files dated within a specific period |
| Document type | Filter by Letter, Photograph, Map, Report, etc. |
| Accession | Show files from a specific accession |
| Fonds / Series | Show files from a specific part of your hierarchy |
| People | Files mentioning a specific person |
| Places | Files mentioning a specific location |
| File type | Filter by image, document, audio, video, etc. |
| Language | Files in a specific language |
You can apply multiple filters at once.
Sorting results
Use the Sort dropdown to order results by:
- Relevance (default) — best matches first
- Date (oldest first) — chronological order
- Date (newest first) — reverse chronological
- Title (A–Z) — alphabetical
The map view
If your files have location data, you can switch to the Map view to see them plotted geographically. See Using the Map for details.
Searching by document content
The Archiver indexes the full text of every document, including text extracted by OCR from scanned images. This means you can search for a specific phrase that appears inside a letter or report — even if that phrase isn't in the title or description.
Example: searching for "harvest failure 1921" will find any document where those words appear in the text.
Use quotes for exact phrases. Searching "Smith family" (with quotes) finds files where those two words appear together, in that order. Without quotes, it finds files containing either "Smith" or "family".
Tips for better searches
- Try alternative spellings — older documents may use historical spellings (e.g. "colour" vs "color")
- Use first and last names — searching "John Smith" finds more specific results than just "Smith"
- Combine filters — e.g. Document type = Letter AND Date range = 1920–1930 AND Person = "Mary Jones"
- Start broad, then narrow — begin with one or two words and add filters to refine