Quicksearch and Advanced Search are the two standard search tools available to all users. Used in conjunction with the Folder, they represent a powerful means of gathering together images which satisfy complex search criteria.

The Art and Architecture search engine interprets queries as broadly as possible so as to minimise the risk of returning no results or missing material which could be of interest. But the trick in searching is to ensure that you get a manageable number of results to look through, without any risk of missing the image you really wanted. A search that yields a thousand results is not much use if you were looking for a specific image; and a search that yields one result is not much use of it isn’t the one you wanted!

You can key a word directly into the Quicksearch box on any page, hit return, and very likely get a set of results. This is the recommended way of quickly getting to a list of images, although single terms often produce long lists.

However, Quicksearch means fast not crude! Users who are familiar with Boolean search operators can also key them directly into this box and quickly run quite complex queries. For instance:

• If you key in 'dogs and hunting', you will find a group of images (currently 40) which have been catalogued with both these terms.
• If you key in 'dogs or hunting' you will find a much longer list of images (currently 401) which have been catalogued with either term.
• If you key in 'dogs not hunting' you wil find a list of images (currently 284) which have been catalogued with the term 'dogs' but not the term 'hunting'

The Quicksearch box is therefore an easy way to get quickly to images, but also a very powerful search tool.

You can see from the examples above how the number of results can vary dramatically depending on the query entered. We recommend that all users experiment with the terms 'and', 'or' and 'not'. For many users, that will be all they need.

Advanced Search

The Advanced Search page gives you the opportunity to formulate a very complex query by entering values in specific fields.

The first three boxes in effect embody the Boolean operators described above:

• With all the words: if you key in 'dogs hunting' here you will get 40 results (you don’t need the 'and' operator because you used this box to key in the terms)
• With at least one of the words: if you key in 'dogs hunting' here you will get 401 results (you don’t need the 'or' operator because you used this box to key in the terms)
• Without the words: this adds an exclusion ('not', which again is assumed because the term is entered in this box)

Using these boxes, you can create queries with multiple criteria which would probably be too complex to key directly into the Quicksearch box.

The remainder of the fields represent specific categories which are in fact identical to the terms you can look through on the browse pages (you can go from here to the browse pages to explore the lists by following the link at the lower of the two toolbars at the top of each page).

Assume that these boxes are linked by the 'and' operator, so that every time you enter a term you are qualifying all previous terms entered, and hence dramatically lowering the likely number of results. By the time you have entered more than two terms in these boxes, you are running quite a high risk of getting no results, so it is worth running the search with just one or two terms to see how many results you are getting. By the time you are down to less than, say, 50 results, you might have more fun looking through the list of results than trying to formulate an even more specific query.

Sorting your search results

The Search Results page is displayed whenever you find some images that satisfy your search criteria (and also when you follow a link which has multiple images as its targets).

You can sort your search results by the three fields displayed for each result: Title/Name, Creator and Location.

When you click one of these three values at the top of the Search Results page, the entire results set is sorted alphabetically by that field. You should be aware that not all fields are filled in for all images: most paintings and drawings do not have locations, and much medieval architecture does not have a named creator.

You can navigate through search results by following the links at top and bottom right of each page in a results set. The ' >> ' icon means 'Go to the last page' and the ' << ' icon means go to the first page.

Search using Dates

The majority of items on the Art and Architecture web site are not dated precisely. Architecture in particular does not lend itself to precise and simple dating, because most buildings of any age have changed and developed over the years and cannot really be said to date from a single year or even decade. A large cathedral complex may have been in an almost continual state of development since it was first built.

It is also hard to assign dates to paintings and drawings. The Courtauld Institute is one of the world’s leading centres for art historical research and as such is reluctant to allow any guesswork in dating objects in its collections.

This means that for the purposes of searching, it is more or less impossible to use dates to restrict searches beyond specifying a single century. You may specify a much narrower range of dates, but if you enter, for example, '1740 to 1750' in the Date field in the Advanced search page, the search engine will have to assume that all items dated '18th century' might have been created in the 1740s, and will therefore have to give you results for the entire century. It will, however, put the more specific dates first in the list of results.

Restricting results to a particular century is, of course, a very useful thing to be able to do. However, it is important for users to be aware of the limitations of date searching on this site. In most cases, you will want to use date ranges as your first search criteria, but then add another in order to narrow your search and get a manageable set of results.