Introduction

This help page is intended to help you to discover the contents of the MICHAEL website. It focuses on the functions related to search, navigation and consulting the MICHAEL data base.

In addition to reading the help, we recommend that you try the various functions to get to know them better. You will find that, when you hover your mouse over buttons and images, additional help text will appear.

Site content

The MICHAEL website includes:

• The MICHAEL data base, which describes the digital cultural heritage. It contains records describing digital collections, cultural institutions and their websites and other digital products. Records are written in the original language of their source and you will find records in the various languages of Europe. Parts of the records are available in several languages and you can switch between languages if you like.
• Articles and user stories, which look at various aspects of the European cultural heritage and the contents of MICHAEL.
• Information about the MICHAEL project and its members.

To navigate you can use the links in the menus on all pages, which you will see on the left hand side of the page and also at the top and bottom.

Quick search

Quick search is available on all the pages of the site:

Using quick search you can find digital collections by a text search of the database. More details about this search are available below.

Language of search

Simply type in a word and it will be used in the search. If you enter more than one word, all the words must be in a record for it to be returned in the search results.

You can enter a phrase by using quotation marks, for example “William Shakespeare”.

You can use the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to connect words or phrases, for example “William Shakespeare” AND “Stratford”.

You can use the wildcard * (instead of several characters in a word) or the wildcard ? (instead of a single character). For example, you can enter theat* instead of theatre or theatrical.
To find out more see the help pages for the Lucene search engine, which is used by MICHAEL.

Database search

The search is carried out on the digital collections records and, to offer more accurate results, also on the records for institutions and services. Names of institutions, collections and services are particularly used in quick searches.

Multilingualism

The MICHAEL website is available in several languages. Each page includes a link that allows you to switch between languages, for example you can switch from English to Italian.

No tool is provided to support translation of the words that you enter into quick search into other languages. However, MICHAEL records contain multilingual elements: the index terms (subjects, places etc) are available in the languages of the MICHAEL website and some records also contain free-text elements (such as the title) in more than one language.

This means that you can enter a word into the Quick Search box in any of the languages of the MICHAEL website. You will find records written in your own language and the other languages of the website (see below for help with translation of your results).

Advanced search

Advanced research allows you to make more precise searches than quick search. Three search forms are available to allow you to search for records of digital collections, institutions and services. For example, the institution form allows you to search for records of an institution by name, while the service form allows you to search for websites suitable for children and so on.

Each form works the same way. You can enter one or more search criteria (the value that you are searching for in a specific field). For example, you can search for “illuminations” in the title field. If you enter several criteria, they are connected by a Boolean operator, either AND, OR or NOT.

See for example this advanced search for services, which is made up of three criteria:

The three criteria are:

• search for “illumination” in the title field AND
• search for “website” in the access type field AND
• search for “professional” in the audience field of service records

We used the Boolean operator AND between the three criteria, which means that only records matching each of the three criteria will be returned in the results. If we had used the Boolean operator OR, records matching one or more of the criteria would have been found. If we had used the Boolean operator NOT, records that matched the criterion would be excluded from the results, for example all records with ‘illumination’ in the title but NOT with the access type ‘CDROM’.

On all the search forms you choose which field(s) to include by using the drop-down list of field-names which appears next to the Boolean operator.

All of the fields available for searching for a digital collection, institution or service appear on the drop-down list. Different fields are available on each of the three search forms.

You can enter a search criteria into a field as follows:

• by typing your search criteria in free text fields as for quick search (see above)
• by selecting a value from a drop-down list
• by selecting a value from a dynamic list – these are lists which appear as you type.

With list fields (whether the list is displayed in a pull-down menu or appears dynamically) you can search for records that exactly match the value that you select. These fields also make it possible to carry out multilingual searches as all the records are described using the same multilingual lists no matter what their source language.

Browse

You can browse the MICHAEL database using the options in the left-hand menu bar.

Choose one of the browse options and you will see a list of, for example, subjects to explore. If you then click on one of the subjects listed you will run produce a search results list.

Browsing is a good way of exploring the multilingual contents of MICHAEL. All the terms have been translated into all the languages of the website and, whichever your search language, will produce the same list of results with records coming from the various partner countries.

Search results

Search results are produced after you:

• run a quick search
• run an advanced search
• click on a term on one of the browse pages
• click on a highlighted term displayed on a record

After a quick search, digital collection records are listed. After an advanced search, your listing will consist of digital collections, institutions or services depending on which search form you used. The same is true of browsing, the results listed depend on the browse that you choose (for example, if you browse for services your listing will consist of service records). In each case a summary of the full record is displayed in the search results list. Here is an example of a list of digital collections:

For each record the main information is provided: image, title (or name of the institution), the URL and the first line of the description. To see the full record all that you need to do is to click on the title or the name of the institution.

You will see that there is a check box nest to each record on the list. This allows you to select records and to save them to your collection basket (see below). All that you need to do is to click on the icon.

If your search retrieves many records the results list will be displayed on several pages. At the top and bottom of each page links allow you to work forwards and back through your listing.

You can reduce the number of search results by using these functions offered on the left-hand menu bar:

• You can filter the results by searching for keywords within the records on your current results list.
• You can group the results by subject, geographical place, etc. You simply select an appropriate value from the lists that are offered.

Consulting full records

After searching or browsing the database, you can consult the full MICHAEL records. You may wish to use these options:

• you can translate part of the record into another language by selecting one of the languages listed.
• you can download the record in various formats including PDF, Simplified HTML and XML
• you can follow the links included in the record, for example to consult a website.
• you can select a record and add it to your collection basket by clicking on the icon.

Other tools

The MICHAEL website offers various tools which are described briefly below.

RSS or Atom feeds

All searches can be output to a dynamic Web page using RSS or Atom. The search results page includes an icon [insert the icon], which you simply click and then choose the protocol that you want to use. There is a link that allows you to download a file describing these information feeds in format OPML.

Language tools

On the left hand menu of the search results pages and the record display you will see an option to use a machine translation tool provided by an external partner. Using this tool you can select a block of text and it will be translated automatically into the language that you choose (MICHAEL is not responsible for quality of the translation).

The MICHAEL website is available in various languages and you can switch from one language to another using the links at the top of each page.

Basket

The basket allows you to save records during a session in which you are using MICHAEL. There is a link on the left-hand menu, use this to see the contents of your basket. It is similar to the search results page and contains a list of the records that you have saved to the basket. You can view record details, remove records from the basket and export the contents in XML, PDF or HTML.

Preferences

Using the preferences page you can specify some options concerning how information is presented to you by MICHAEL. Your preferences are saved as cookies in your Web browser.

The options are:

• Highlighting of search terms: if you select this option, your search words will be highlighted in the search results and record display.
• Number of results: this allows you to specify the maximum number of records listed on each search results page.
• Opening results in a new window: if you select this option each time that you look at a record it will open in a new window of your web-browser.
• Language of the interface: The MICHAEL interface is available in several languages and you can use this option to specify which one you want to use. This is not essential as when you enter the MICHAEL URL, the website will either open in the language of your web-browser (if it matches one of the languages in which the site is available) or it will open on a page that allows you to choose which version of the site you want to use. But If you specify the language of the interface using the preference form it takes precedence. This can be useful if, for example you are using an English web-browser but you would prefer to use the Italian version of the MICHAEL website.