Search Items
Search Items: This will provide a list of choices as to how to narrow or filter your selection.
Search for Keywords: Enter any combination of characters and click “Search Items” (at the bottom of the window) or click “enter”. This will find any records that have an exact match in any field within any record.
Narrow by Specific Fields:
This allows the user to select from a dropdown box a field that may be of interest. NYCSHS uses only 18 fields some of which are more useful than others. (See the appendix below) The next dropdown allows a choice of search types for comparing the field entry with your desire. For example to find all Pacific type locomotives you could enter Field “Class/Lot” and “starts with” then in the third box enter “K”
Clicking on “Add a Field” allows additional refinement of the filter. For example you might want to “Add a Field”, “Road Nbr”, choose the “And” operator and “contains”, “MC”, then “Add a Field”, “Or”, “Class/Lot”, “starts with” “K”, then “Add a Field”, “And”, “Road Nbr”, “contains” “P&LE”. Clicking on the “Search Items” will find all Pacifics numbered for Michigan Central or Pittsburgh & Lake Erie
The system will evaluate the “OR” operator before the “And” operator, so “K” and “MC” “Or” P&LE” will find MC Pacifics and P&LE items that may or may not be Pacifics.
Search by Range of IDs: Not useful for our system because the ID is a system assigned value only for technical database management.
Search by Collection: All of our items are in a single NYCSHS Collection; Not useful for our system
Search by Tag: This works the same as Browse by Tag, but allows you to provide more than a single tag, such that you could indicate #6010, Harmon to indicate all items that have both the tags #6010 and Harmon.
Search by Type: At this time all items are of the type “photograph”, in the future as we expand to other items, it will become of greater use.
Search by Featured/Non-Featured: Not applicable for our implementation of system.
Appendix
Fields
- Identifier: This is the file name for the item. Needed for purchasing a copy.
- Title: Name for the item record
- Subject: Very general topic of the item
- Sub-subject: a more specific sub-division of the topic
- Class/Lot: Locomotives were assigned a class by the railroad; other rolling stock was built or bought by railroad lot number
- Road Number: Rolling stock items were assigned numbers by the railroad. Each item had a unique number, although some items were renumbered at various times
- Builder: This identifies the company that built the item (used nearly always for rolling stock items); Builders have been abbreviated
- Description: An additional descriptive element for the item; many are blank because the defined fields contain all of the available information
- Location: City and state where the item was found. Note: Not uniformly available for all photographs.
- Creator: The name of the person photographer.
- Contributor: The name of the person who donated the original to the NYCSHS
- Date created: the date the photo was taken. Date formats vary greatly so a range of dates will not work in a search. Using 1/1/1940 may find a picture, but Jan. 1, 1940 will not find that item
- Negative Number: Some official builder or railroad photos were assigned a number. If that number is known it would appear, but a very small number of items are non-blank
- Format: This describes the original as to size and type image
- Rights Holder: If there is a known copyright, the owner of that copyright would be shown
- Previously used: If the photo has been published in the past the publication, if known, would show
- Notes: In rare instances there might be more than one item cross-referenced. The related item Identifier would be shown.