Help

Overview

ASCSA.net provides access to collections maintained in the libraries, excavations, and archives of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA).

You can search either a single collection on ASCSA.net or you can search all the collections simultaneously. To start a search, you can:

type keywords into the search box at the top of any page
select a collection name from the ASCSA.net home page
select an item type from the sidebar
select an area inside a map view

These search methods can be combined and adjusted.

To clear your search criteria and return to the home page, click ASCSA.net at the top of any page.

Example

To find all Frankish coins in the Corinth Excavations, start at the ASCSA.net home page; select Corinth Excavations (to search for items from only that collection); then click Coins in the sidebar (to select only coins); and then enter frankish into the search box.

Sidebar

The sidebar (at left) provides various tools for working with your search results.

Under "Show" in the sidebar, click on an item type to restrict the results to items of a particular type, such as:

Publications
Reports
Places and Monuments
Plans and Drawings
Images
Objects
Coins
Notebooks

Under "View as" in the sidebar, choose any of four ways to view your results:

List
Icons
Table
Map

List view looks like a Google results page. Icons view looks like Google's image search. Table view looks like an Excel spreadsheet. Map view will plot the results on a background plan.

Tip: Choosing a different view will not reset your search results.

Tip: Check the sidebar for other tools and for links to related items.

Basic Field Searching

To search for a term in all available fields, type the term into the search box:

lekythos

To search for an exact phrase in all available fields, enclose the phrase in quotation marks:

"red figure"

To search for a term in a specific field (for example, in the title field), type the field name, then a colon, and then the term:

title:lekythos

To search for an exact phrase in a specific field, enclose the phrase in quotation marks:

title:"red figure"

Tip: Terms that are typed outside of quotation marks will not be read as an exact phrase. The following query will search for the first term (red) in the title field, and will search for the second term (figure) in all available fields:

title:red figure

Advanced Field Searching

The field names used on ASCSA.net (see list at left) differ within each ASCSA collection. The collection field names are case-insensitive and are written with no spaces when used for field searching. For example, this query will search for an object with inventory number P 43:

inventorynumber:"P 43"

The ASCSA.net collection fields are also mapped to equivalent Dublin Core (dc) fields (see list at left). Searching a Dublin Core field will search equivalent and similar ASCSA collection fields. For example, the title field and the caption field are both mapped to the Dublin Core title field (dc-title). Using the Dublin Core field dc-title allows you to search the title field and the caption field at the same time:

dc-title:inscription

You can also perform complex searches by using parentheses and the boolean operators and/or/not. For example, to find all items that have the word "pottery" in the category field and a word beginning with gorgon- in either the dc-title field or in the dc-description field, enter this query into the search box:

category:pottery and (dc-title:gorgon* or dc-description:gorgon*)

Range Searching

Range searching allows you to find items whose field values are within a given range. This query:

masl:[60.30 to 61.52]

will find items that have a recorded elevation between and including 60.30 and 61.52 meters above sea level.

And this query:

chronology:[-500 to 100]

will find items that have been assigned a date in the chronology field between 500 B.C. and 100 A.D. (years B.C. are expressed as negative numbers).

For range searches in the date field, you can enter dates in almost any format you like; for example:

date:[June 1942 to 28/9/1943]

will find items that have a date recorded between June 1st, 1942 and September 28th, 1943.

Special Symbols

To find all results where a field is not empty, use the * symbol. For example, this query will search for items that have been assigned a date in the chronology field:

chronology:*

To find all results where a field is empty, use a pair of quotation marks. For example, this query will search for items that have not been assigned a date in the chronology field:

chronology:""

The following query will search for items whose date of excavation has been recorded but which have not been assigned a date in the chronology field:

date:* and chronology:""

Solr

This site uses Apache Solr. Full details of the query syntax for searching can be found at: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/