The Scottish Military Research Group - Commemorations Project

spoons

It occurred to me that not everyone may know how to make the best of searches on UKNIWM.

Using just the simple search option and looking at two fields only (Keyword and Place or Building Name) I will give a few examples.

If you want to find memorials for post offices in Scotland you could start by putting the words post office in the keyword field and Scotland in the Place field. The problem with that is that the search logic applies an 'or' to a field with more than one word so you get all memorials that have the word post plus ALL of those that have the word office. To get just post offices you need to put it as a phrase in double quotes "post office".

You might then want to narrow it down to only WW1 memorials, so you can add WW1 after "post office" in the Keyword field. Then the 'or' problem occurs again, so you would get all the post offices plus ALL the WW1 memorials. To get the search to return only the post office memorials for WW1, you need to put a plus sign in front of each search word or phrase, like this.........

+"post office" +WW1

If your search brings you back far more than you bargained for, then you may be able to reduce it by use of the word 'not' before something you want excluded.

For example if you are looking for someone named Cameron on a Scottish memorial, you could try putting Cameron in the Keyword field and Scotland in the place field. Trouble is that you get all the memorials for Cameron highlanders in the list. To get rid of memorials mentioning highlanders you can use the following in the Keyword field.............

cameron not highlanders

The only trouble with that is that if the Cameron you are looking for served with the Cameron Highlanders (or even the Gordon Highlanders come to that) then he won't be on your list.

Have fun.

\Paul

Adam Brown · Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 10:25 am Post subject:

Paul

Excellent tips. I didn't know about the double quotes. I will try them out later.

Cheers

Adam