About Digital Collections

Digital Collections is a growing repository of digital image collections held at Indiana University campuses. While this service will grow to include digital images, digital objects with multiple pages, digital archival materials, and more, it is currently under development and does not yet contain all materials from legacy services offered at Indiana University Bloomington and IUPUI.

Search Help

Results from Collections, Works, and Within Images

Search results will reflect matches within Collection metadata, Work metadata, and optical character recognition (OCR) or transcript text available for image files within a work. The more terms you search, the more precise the results returned will be. So if 0 results are returned for a multiple term search, try removing a term to increase the chances of matching results.

Boolean operators - AND and NOT

Searching multiple terms will conduct a Boolean AND search by default (hoagy carmichael is the same search as hoagy AND carmichael). You can also restrict results using NOT (hoagy NOT carmichael). OR as a Boolean operator does not combine (or union) results for multiple search terms. You can search for apples and you can search for strawberries but searching for apples OR strawberries returns the same results as a Boolean AND search (apples AND strawberries). Boolean operators must be in all-caps (AND, NOT) in order to be searched as operators between search terms. The plus sign (+) can be used in place of AND (hoagy +carmichael) and the minus sign (-) can be used in place of NOT (hoagy -carmichael). The spaces around the plus and minus signs make a difference.

Highlighted terms within images

If search terms match terms in OCR or transcript text within images, those terms will be highlighted as much as possible within the images themselves when viewing the Work. If multiple terms are searched, this “search within” feature will want to find all terms in order to identify a match, otherwise you will see an alert that “No matches were found.” It is also possible for search term highlighting to miss highlighting a term within an image so if a result is returned but the images do not have all terms highlighted, try using the search within feature of the embedded viewer to search terms individually or in combination within the OCR or transcript text more precisely. If images are of handwritten text, the OCR is not likely to be useful for accurate search within results.

Please note that Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) do not work within the viewer search.

Common words

There are common terms that might cause too many results to return. For example, when searching for Works about the song Memphis in June you can search memphis june and the results are very different than searching for memphis in june. Examples of common words that will get in the way of more precise search results are: and, or, the, in, for, am, on, if, is

Exact search

Another way to help in the case of common terms is to use exact searching. You can search for "memphis in june" using double quotes to surround all search terms and results will come back that contain all of those terms in that order. Capitalization is ignored.