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British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries spans
more than 400 years of personal writings, bringing together the voices
of women from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. This database
lets researchers view history in the context of women’s thoughts – their
struggles, achievements, passions, pursuits, and desires.
Extending back to the 1500s, the collection will show researchers the
various shapes and formats of the diary as it evolved, including the
travel diary, the daily personal diary, letter diaries, and other forms.
British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries
includes approximately 100,000 pages of material assembled from numerous
bibliographies and from newly conducted research. Alongside the
published material are 4,000 facsimile pages of previously unpublished
manuscripts.
Ways to use the
database:
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Table of
Contents--
Use these to see what's contained in the database. This is the best
way to check whether an author or a source is included. To use this
tool, simply click on the appropriate table of contents button on
the navigation bar.
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Find Tools
-- The "FIND" tools let you search for specific authors and sources
that the database contains and combine criteria to narrow down what
you're looking for. The difference between the "FIND" tools and the
"SEARCH" tools (explained next) is in the results they give. The
"FIND" tools do not return documents, but rather lists of authors
and sources in the database.
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Search Tools
-- The "SEARCH" tools let you analyze words and documents that occur
within the text of stories that meet your search criteria. The
"SEARCH" tools return stories or bibliographic citations or both.
Boolean
Operators in Full-Text Searching:
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The vertical
line ( | ) is the OR operator (e.g., avarice|greed or holy
ghost|spirit).
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Space: serves
as the AND operator in sentence and paragraph Proximity Searching
(e.g., church state retrieve all cases where church and state appear
in the same specified context; this is not the case in phrase
searching).
-
These
expressions can be combined for more sophisticated searches; for
example, searching
old|aged|ancient m.n|fellow*
finds any of the three adjectives together with the nouns man or
fellow in the singular or plural.
Wildcard
Characters in Full-Text Searching:
. (period):
matches any
single character (e.g., gentlem.n will retrieve gentleman and
gentlemen).
* (asterisk):
matches any
string of characters, anchoring the match at the beginning of a word
(e.g., cigar* will match cigar, cigars, cigarette, etc.).
* (asterisk):
matches any
string of characters, anchoring the match at the end of a word (e.g.,
*habit will retrieve habit, cohabit, and inhabit), or in the middle
(e.g., c.*eers matches compeers, cheers, and careers).
.? (period
question mark):
matches the
characters entered or the characters entered plus one more character in
place of the question mark (e.g., hono.?r matches both honor and honour
and cat.? matches cat and cats, but not cathedral, Catherine, etc.).
[a-z] (brackets):
matches a
single character found in the specified range (e.g., [c-f]at will match
cat, dat, eat, and fat) or any letters within the brackets (e.g.,
civili[zs]e will match both civilize and civilise).
# (hash mark):
matches
capitalized words only (e.g., #bacon will retrieve Bacon, but not
bacon). Otherwise word searches are case insensitive. Please note that
this operator does not work properly in conjunction with the vertical
bar (e.g., searching #hamlet|#bacon will not retrieve accurate results).
E (capital
letter):
matches all
accented and non-accented forms (e.g., to search naïveté regardless of
accents type naIvetE).
You may access British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries from anywhere
with a valid APSU ID.
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