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This catalogue is in the process of being developed. Once it is complete it will contain lists to all the catalogued archives held by Somerset Record Office, Bath & North East Somerset Record Office and Weston super Mare Library, and all the books and pamphlets held at the Somerset Record Office. At the moment it contains about 332,700 entries. The
catalogue is being updated monthly to incorporate additional catalogues as
they are prepared for online access, and any new cataloguing that has been
carried out. Click to see what is new
this month. Searching the catalogue When searching, the more precise the request the fewer items will be retrieved by the system. Enter your request in one or more fields, then click 'Search'. Any text: This searches any field containing text rather than numbers, and is likely to give a large number of hits. RefNo: Use this search if you know the specific reference code for a collection or item. Eg. entering the code D\P\tau.ja would allow you to see the catalogue for Taunton St James Parish. Title: This searches on the title of the document or collection, eg. log book, account book, MERRIOTT PARISH COUNCIL, etc. The titles of collections will come up in capitals. Date: This allows you to search for documents of a particular date or range of dates, for example 1789, 1850-1860, or 19th cent. Place, Name and Subject: Work is taking place to index all lists by place, name (surname, personal name or corporate name as appropriate), and subject. About 10% of lists have been indexed so far. Therefore, if you receive no hits try your search again using the 'Any text' field. Once all the entries have been added to the system a further programme of indexing will take place. This is a time-consuming project, and is likely to take at least a year to complete. Clicking the underlined field name for Subject on the left hand side allows you to look up whether the term you want has been used in the indexes. A separate lookup box appears, where you can type a subject term to see whether it has been included as an index term. Alternative close matches will also be listed. Please note that at present the system is only able to display the first 18 terms that match your request. However, typing an asterisk (*) alone into the lookup field allows you to see an alphabetical list of all the index terms currently being used. Category: Work is also going on to define certain categories of archive, which are frequently requested. The following categories are available:
Author: The catalogue includes books and pamphlets housed at the Somerset Record Office. Use this field if you wish to search for a printed book by author. Please note that it DOES NOT include books held at B&NES Record Office or Weston super Mare Library, and at present only includes books and pamphlets that have been added to the Somerset Record Office library since the beginning of 2002. [Back to top] This allows you to check which spelling of a surname has been used for indexing purposes. Enter the surname in the search box. Family Name: The name which appears as the 'FamilyName' is the spelling that has been used for indexing purposes. It is this spelling which should be entered when making searches on the Name field in 'Search Catalogue'. Non Preferred Term: If a surname appears as a 'NonPreferredTerm' this means that it is an alternative spelling of the name, but not the one that has been selected for indexing purposes. Parallel Entry: This gives options of alternative surnames which have close roots to the surname you have entered, but are not considered close enough to be alternative spellings. [Back to top] Search results are presented as a hitlist, 10 to a page. Click on Next and Prev (Previous) to move through the hitlist. To see more detail about an item click the blue number on the left hand side, which will open a detailed description. To see the item in the context of the whole collection click on the underlined reference number. This will show you how the item fits in with other documents in the same collection. Some items are closed to public access due to legal or confidentiality reasons. The access status of these items is marked as 'Closed', and the date they are closed until will also appear. If the access status is marked as 'Open' these records can be seen at the repository. If the access status is marked as 'Mixed' at collection level this means that some items within the collection are open and some are closed. In these cases it is necessary to look at the access status of individual items within that collection in order to see whether they are open or closed. [Back to top] You may enter your search in upper or lower case. This will not affect your search. The * (asterisk) can be used as a wildcard. For example entering Comb* would bring up all instances of comb, Combe or the surname Comber, etc. The options at the bottom of the screen can be used to do more complex searches as follows:
Use the back arrow on your browser to move back to the tree or the hitlist. If you use Internet Explorer and cannot find the word(s) you wanted in a long description, use Control + F to bring up the Find box. [Back to top] |