Guide to items and collections

 
Items are the single units of digitised content that we have made available online, such as a page, photograph, or map.
These items are grouped into collections. That can take the form of books and albums, or a series of maps and photographs.

 

They are grouped to allow users to navigate the items easily and to provide context. The amount of information provided on each collection differs. For collections with information-heavy items such as newspapers, collection descriptions are minimal. For collections of photographs or albums more detailed descriptions have been provided to outline the context in which the items were produced.

The way in which collections are structured varies depending on the type of content and the ways in which users access them.

For the Annual Bulletin we took the decision to arrange each individual article as a collection. This was to enable article specific searching by title and author. As you will see from browsing the collection the Annual Bulletin are therefore structured by Volume>Issue>Part (Information, Reports, Article1, Article 2, Article 3, etc)>items (pages).

For newspapers, they are structured chronologically to aid intuitive browsing to relevant periods, Decade>Year>Month>Day>items (pages). At each stage in this structure, you can use the search function available on the browse page to generate results relevant to the level you are in the hierarchy.

For instance, if you enter the term ‘Granville’ whilst in the 1850s, the search engine will generate a list of results from any issue of the newspaper published in the 1850s. If you can be more specific on the date you are looking for, you could browse through 1850s>1854>March, before using the search, this will significantly reduce the number of results generated and hopefully allow you to find the reference you are looking for more quickly.