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RAAM Help


The RAAM database contains records describing non-government archives held in Australian archival repositories and libraries. The scope and purpose of RAAM is fully described in About RAAM. A Database description and Sample records are also provided to assist users to interpret their search results. The aim of this page is to help you use RAAM. If you are still puzzled by any aspect of RAAM don't hesitate to contact us by email at: raam@nla.gov.au.


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The navigation bar

There is a navigation bar at the bottom of every RAAM page:

Return to RAAM Home Page

Returns you to the RAAM home page, enabling you to conduct a search, to read About RAAM or to follow links to related sites.

Search

Returns you to the standard search form on the RAAM home page

Advanced search

Takes you to the Advanced search page where you will find a range of advanced search options to supplement the four search options on the standard form.

Browse terms

Enables you to browse selected RAAM indexes if you are not sure which search terms to use.

Browse repositories

Enables you to browse a list of the repositories contributing entries to RAAM, by name or state.

Update

Enables you to propose corrections to a RAAM entry or, if you are an online contributor, to login to the data entry part of RAAM, which has its own navigation bar.

Help

A link to this page.


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Searching RAAM

Searching RAAM is simple. From the RAAM home page select a search option, type in one or more words (or numbers) in the input box and press the "Search" button. To select a search option, position the arrow on the corresponding radio button and click with the mouse.

The option has been selected correctly when the white circle contains a black dot. It is only possible to select one option for each search.

As the default, the Creator search option is already selected when the RAAM home page is accessed. If the form is cleared using the "Reset" button, the Creator search option is reselected automatically.


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Search syntax

All of the search options provided through this form are keyword searches. Words used in these searches can be input in any order. For example a search using the words "performing arts" or "arts performing" will retrieve the same results. Records will only be retrieved if all of the words used in the search are found and if they are in the same RAAM record.

Words can be of any length, including single letters. However, you may get a database timed out message if you search on single letters or very common words such as "and", "or" or "the" without combining them with other words.

You can use capitals or punctuation -or not - as you prefer. RAAM converts all input to lower case and replaces punctuation (including hyphens) with a space:

J.C. Williamson = j c williamson
Wallace-Crabbe = wallace crabbe

There is one exception: the apostrophe in words like d'Alton must be included for a match to occur.


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Search options

Creator

The Creator option matches the words you enter against the Creator field. This field includes personal, family and organisation names. An entry will be retrieved if all of the words in a search occur in the same record, in any order. If you are interested in the papers of more than one creator, you will need to conduct a separate search for each creator - or alternatively, use the Advanced Search form.

Personal or family names

When searching for personal or family names, use as many words as are needed to produce a manageable result set. "Dunlop" will retrieve entries that include the names Cossart, Leslie Dunlop; Dunlop Rubber (Australia) Ltd; and Dunlop, Alex. For more common personal names, also use one or more of the person's given names or initials - for example, Patrick White.

If you are uncertain of the full form of a name, you can use the Browse term function to browse the creator index to see how the name has been recorded and to identify variant forms (e.g., Hawke, Bob and Hawke, R J L ).

Organisation names

When searching for organisation names, use the most significant words from the name of the organisation. Commonly used words such as branch, union, club, and company should be omitted from the search where possible, or used in combination with more specific terms from the name of the organisation. Words that are frequently abbreviated such as department (dept), company (co) or limited (ltd) should be omitted to ensure that variant forms of the same name are retrieved.

As for personal and family names,you can use the Browse term function to browse the creator index for organisation names. However, keyword searching is more likely to give a better result as the word order in organisation names is not as predictable.

Creator + Names

The Creator + Names option matches the words you enter against a combination of the Creator field and the Names field. This option has been provided to allow you to search for any mention of a person, family or organisation in a RAAM entry whether they are the creator of the material described or have some equivalent or secondary responsibility (for example, one of the co-correspondents in a collection of letters; or another member of the same family). The same searching tips apply for the Creator + Names search option as for the Creator search option.

Note that the Creator + Names search does not include names that are only mentioned in other fields such as the title or summary. These names can be searched using the All indexed words search option.

Occupation

The Occupation search option provides a basic thematic approach to RAAM based on terms describing the occupation of the Creator. A search using this option uses an index based on the terms provided in the Occupation field. These terms are taken from the Occupations Thesaurus which is maintained by the National Library.

All of the Occupation terms are in the plural form (e.g. politicians; farmers) and will need to be searched in that form. As an alternative to a keyword search you can also use the browse term function to browse the occupations index to find the correct form of a term.

Note that not all entries in RAAM have been assigned a term from the Occupations Thesaurus. The All indexed words search option provides an alternative approach to finding RAAM entries that contain occupation-related data. The All Indexed Words option searches the Summary, Title and Biographical Notes fields and these fields often contain information about the occupation of the creator and of other persons associated with the creator.

All indexed words

A search using the "All indexed words" search option will look for matches in a combined index that includes all of the fields in the entry. RAAM will only retrieve entries containing all of the search words, but these can occur in any of the fields that are searched by this index. Through this search option you can:

  • Search for words that occur in fields other than Creator, Name or Occupation: for example, summary, biographical note, location, RAAM number.
  • Combine values from multiple fields: for example, to find the papers of poets held by the State Library of Victoria.

When using this index avoid very commonly used words in RAAM such as letters, diaries, and papers - or use them in combination with other words.


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Viewing results

RAAM search results are sorted alphabetically by creator name. Entries that do not include a creator field file at the end of the alphabetical sequence.

At the top of the search result screen you will find a summary of the search results:

Your Search is on Creator: melba
Displaying records 1-10 of 17

This means that 17 entries were retrieved, and this page is displaying the first 10 records.

Your Search is on Creator: balzac
Displaying records 1-1 of 0
No records were found.

This means that there were no RAAM entries that contained the word balzac in the creator field.

The information recorded about each entry is sufficient to identify the items and includes the Creator; the Title of the entry; the Format of the item where this is available, and the Location. There is a link to the left of the screen which enables you to view a display of the whole entry in RAAM.

When the whole entry is displayed, all of the fields that have been included in an individual entry will appear on the screen, but fields that do not include any information are suppressed from display.

Sample records


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Advanced search

The advanced search form enables you to perform more complex searches. You can combine up to three sets of search words using the Boolean operators 'AND', 'OR' or 'AND NOT'. Type in the word or words you want to find in each input box and specify the field you wish to search and how you want the searches to be combined by making selections from the drop-down lists.

For example, the following search would retrieve entries having to do with the New South Wales Department of Education whether or not the state was abbreviated in the entry:

Search for: in:
in:
in:

Two additional search options may be specified through the advanced search form: NUC Symbol and Location Name. These search options enable you to limit a search to a given repository using either its National Union Catalogue Symbol or keywords from its name. The following search will retrieve records of Daisy Bates held by the Deakin University Library:

Search for: in:
in:
in:

You can also use the advanced search form to restrict a search to entries added to RAAM or modified before, after or on a specified date. Use the drop down lists to specify the date field and range to search and input the year and (optionally) the month in the boxes provided.

An option to search by RAAM number has been provided to allow a direct search for an entry known to be in the RAAM database where the RAAM number is already known. The RAAM number is a unique number assigned to an entry when it is first added to RAAM. Entries added to RAAM before December 2000 have both an old and a new RAAM number. RAAM defaults to matching your input against the new RAAM number unless you specify otherwise.


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Browsing terms

Three browse options have been provided to complement keyword searching, based on indexes of the Creator, Creator + Names and Occupations fields. To select a browse option, position the arrow on the corresponding radio button and click with the mouse. As the default, the Creator browse option is already selected when the Browse Terms page is accessed. If the form is cleared using the Reset button, the Creator browse option is reselected automatically.

To browse the selected index, enter as many characters as are needed to place you alphabetically within the index where you would expect the required term to occur. RAAM will display ten terms to a page. You can change this and specify more terms to a page if required, using the input box below the browse options.

You will be able to see the number of occurrences of each term in RAAM and also to navigate to a list of the entries in which each term appears. You will also be able to browse up and down the index from the point specified.

Creator and Creator + Name

These two browse options enable you to scan lists of names that have been used in the Creator field or the Creator and Name fields. This function is particularly useful for finding names where you are not sure of the spelling or full form of the name. Generally, personal names have been entered under the proper name of the individual with the surname first followed by a comma; and organisations have been entered under the commonly used form of the organisation's name. Entities within the organisation such as branches or divisions have been entered hierarchically.

The browse is case-insensitive but you will need to enter punctuation for the browse to work:

To find:   Enter:
Blanche d'Alpuget   d'alpuget
Thomas Jones   jones, t
Chris Wallace-Crabbe   wallace-crab

Alternatively, just enter the surname or as many characters as are needed to limit the number of terms retrieved.

Occupation

The Browse Occupation option enables you to scan the list of terms that have been used in the Occupation field in RAAM and to retrieve those entries that contain the term. To view all terms beginning with a given letter of the alphabet, just enter that letter.


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Browsing repositories

The Browse Repository function enables you to browse a list of the agencies that contribute records to RAAM. There are two options:

  • Browse repositories by name.
  • Browse repositories by state.

To browse repositories by name select the appropriate alphabetical section. The number of entries in RAAM for each repository is displayed to the right of the name. To look at the entries, select list on the left-hand side of the screen.

To browse repositories by state, select the appropriate state. The abbreviations used in RAAM for the Australian States and Territories are as follows:

Australian Capital Territory = ACT
New South Wales = NSW
Northern Territory = NT
Queensland = QLD
South Australia = SA
Tasmania = TAS
Victoria = VIC
Western Australia = WA

When browsing repositories by state, the number of occurrences is not given but you can still look at the entries by selecting list on the left-hand side of the screen.


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Updating RAAM

Any user of RAAM may propose a correction to a RAAM entry. To link to this form from other pages, select the Update option on the navigation bar.

If you are a library or archive with eligible material you may register as a RAAM contributor and contribute records through an online form.

There is also a range of Offline update options. RAAM can accept large files of data via electronic transfer, or small numbers of records in Word tables or Excel spreadsheets. You can even send us records in written form.

If you are a library already contributing records to the National Bibliographic database via Kinetica, any changes you make to your in-scope Kinetica entries will be added automatically to RAAM on a periodic basis.


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Logging in (online contributors only)

When you register as an online contributor, you will be given a User name and password.

To login, select the Update option from the navigation bar. Enter your User name and password and select the "Login" button.

A Login failed message means that you have entered an incorrect User name/password combination. Use the "Back" button to try again

To clear the text in the field boxes, select the "Reset" button.

If you cannot login for any reason, or if you need to change your password, contact the RAAM Administrator by email at raam@nla.gov.au or by phone on (02) 6262 1598 or (02) 6262 1250.

There is a separate Update help page to assist you to add, edit or delete your records.

Return to RAAM Home Page

Search | Advanced search | Browse terms | Browse repositories | Update | Help


Comments on any aspect of the Register are welcome and may be sent by email to: raam@nla.gov.au
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Last updated Monday 26-Mar-2007
http://www.nla.gov.au/raam/raamhelp.html