Help with Searching

Local vs. Gateway Searching

Local searching only works if your system administrator has connected FreeWAIS to your World-Wide Web client. If it does not work, notify your system administrator, and jump to WATERS Global Search to use instead one of the Global Search Gateways.

Constructing Queries

To search, enter in the space provided as much information as you can about the report or reports you desire. Just provide those words or names that are likely to appear in a relevant bibliographic citation or abstract, and the WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) software will find the best overall matches.

Hints for Better Searching

The WATERS server supports many nice query features such as Boolean searching, partial word matching and literal string searches. For example:

ileaf clipboard: tells about anything with ileaf OR clipboard in it
ileaf and clipboard: tells about anything with ileaf AND clipboard in close proximity to each other
ileaf not clipboard: tells about anything with ileaf BUT NOT clipboard
inter*: partial word match. Could match such things as interleaf, interdependant, Internet, etc. Note that you can't do something like Inter*et and expect it to match Internet. (The documentation mentions that this is slightly buggy in that it sometimes skips words that it should have matched.)
"Old Dominion": the string inside the quotes is interpreted as one keyword and not "Old or Dominion" as it normally would be. You cannot embed boolean or partial matches inside the quotes as they will be used as part of the literal search string and not as a modifier to the search.

Interpreting Result List

If searching using your query gives an empty result list, try searching again using more words or names. A successful search leads to a list of citations, in descending order of the computer's estimate of relative relevance (on a scale of 0-1000) --- that is the first number given. The second number indicates how many lines of citation/abstract data will be returned if you select the title that immediately follows. Note that in many cases, the citation/abstract screen that you can obtain will also show how to obtain the complete report.

Partial example:

1000 4 K. Maly, et al. "Interactive Remote Instruction Technology.", November 29, 1993.

In this example, the relevance estimate is 1000 (the maximum), and there are 4 lines in the preview file for the entry. However, in an actual result list the information will be underlined, indicating a hyperlink to a preview of the contents of the report. If selected, the preview will appear very quickly whereas the document proper may take some time because WATERS will have to fetch a potentially large file from a remote site and send it to you. The preview files are all ASCII text and contain the citation (and abstract, if available) for the paper.

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