From the Library's Home page
Click on the Databases link in the left hand menu.
Checking these boxes selects the publication year to be searched. If you do not know which year you must select all of them - to search for all possible years. Note that if nothing is specified it will automatically search files from the 1990s.
This will find the search term(s) entered wherever they occur in the record. No special treatment is made of the terms (except for 'and' '&' - which are treated as equivalent, and 'or' which is not searchable).
The three pop-up lists allow searchers to select from the same headings that were used in the original printed index. This achieves consistency with the back data, and gives some simple keyword-like acces to the data. When resources permit a more detailed system of keywording will be added to complement and make those headings more useful for online searching.
The term "Other" is used in the following ways: Under Continent and Region it is used to mean either no geographical area was specified or more than one e.g. comparisions between Africa and America or West and East Africa.
Under Subject it is used to mean either more than one of the AIO subjects, (e.g. linguistics and archaeology, as in the case of inscriptions), for articles of a theoretical nature or concerning subjects only partially covered by AIO e.g. demography, human ecology, statistics etc.
In order to facilitate an article search, the Anthropological Index Online has a keywords list that can be used for refined searches. This allows the retrieval of articles even if the words are not contained in the title. The Keywords list is largely based on the British Museum, Museum of Mankind's library Thesaurus and the Library of Congress reference handbooks. A preliminary look at the keywords can be useful to identify areas and preferred terms used in the indexing of AIO articles. The list includes the world's most important ethnic groups, and archaeological sites, geographical areas, as well as names of the scholars whose work has been indexed in AIO.
Most ethnic groups are listed under the most common terms used in the anthropological literature. e.g. the Northwest Coast ethnic group Kwakwaka'wakw, goes under the name of Kwakiutl, the Kenyan group Abagusii can be found under Gusii, and the Siberian ethnic group Vogul will be found under the voice Mansi, etc. Please note that AIO ethnic names choice is purely functional to keep accuracy and consistency standards that would not be possible to maintain, should we follow the current rate by which ethnic groups change their names. Ethnic groups themselves often present different spellings for their name. AIO does not take a political stance in relation to this choice.
Descriptive keywords are also included in the list. Descriptive keywords cover the theoretical aspects of research. For example, specific theories and/or methodologies go under 'Theory of...anthropology, archaeology' etc. The same applies to authors'specific works. Marcel Mauss's theory can be found for instance either under 'Work of Marcel Mauss', 'Theory of anthropology' or 'History of anthropology' (all descriptive keywords). More recent works are going to be found under the authors' name with the forename always before the surname e.g 'Work of Clifford Geertz', the name on its own usually stands for an obituary.
Anthropological Index 0nline does not cover the archaeology of the northern hemisphere (Europe, the Balkans and Russia) after the Middle Ages. This is unless this period's archaeological surveys carried out in such countries are relevant for either theoretical or methodological reasons.
A list of keywords is available as a single listing on one page (warning 190k long)
Terms entered here will search for author names. The default is to look for whole names. Also note that publications by "institutional authors" have the institution name treated as author. The back data contains initials only so authors should be searched for either by plain surname, or by putting initials before the surname i.e. searching for "d zeitlyn" finds works by David Zeitlyn. Note also that the early data has not been fully key-worded. New data will include first names where they are available.
This searches for terms in the article titles.
This searches for the journal title. The raw data contains both full and contracted titles and both are searched if a term is entered in the 'journal' field. A check box at the bottom allows you to select the display of short title only. A list of all journal titles is available. Apart from the publication year, all the search terms can be restricted to search for whole words, for words beginning or ending with the search term or to look anywhere in a word. Clicking on the box to the right of the input box for each term will reveal a list of the options. Note that if you choose 'anywhere' then truncation is automatic - no '*' is necessary.
Languages are searchable but only where the data exists - in some of the older data the identity of some commoner languages was taken to be obvious so has not been entered. English is the unmarked default. Note that at present it is not possible to do "NOT" searching (so, for example, you cannot opt to exclude non- English sources). We are aware of the need to do this and are considering means to enable it. Languages used include the following: Albanian, Armenian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Kazakh, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian
If an email address has been filled in on the search form then it is possible for you to have the results emailed to you - once an email address has been given, an extra button appears on the results pages giving the option to have the search results emailed to you.
As is stated on the main search page terms entered in different fields will automatically be combined - So "zeitlyn" in Author and "soothsayer" in title will find a work by one of the anthropologists called Zeitlyn with the word soothsayer in the title.
At present we cannot implement an "or" search between fields, however, it is possible within a single field. Either the word "or" or a comma should be used to separate the alternatives to be searched for. In other words a search for "Nigeria or Cameroon" in the title field will find all the entries that have EITHER "Nigeria" OR "Cameroon" (OR BOTH) in their title.
If two or more terms are entered then an implicit "AND" is understood. Thus, a search for "Mambila Soothsay" in the title field will find an article in which BOTH the string "Mambila" AND the string "Soothsay" occur in the same field.
Note that only one operator is possible in a single field at the moment, so it is not possible to do "x and y or z". Brackets cannot be used to construct complex search terms. These types of sophistication may be implemented at a later date but we need feedback to persuade us that MANY people want them!