Skip to content

How to Search

 

There are three ways to begin your search journey on the uHub document database:

 

 

  1. The most flexible and comprehensive way to begin a search is to type a word or phrase in the Search Box. This will search all items in the database, based on their titles, the keywords (metadata) that we have associated with items and even the text within the documents themselves. As it is a ‘fuzzy logic’ search the system will even guess at the best results if you misspell a word or if the word you type is similar but not identical to a word used in the title, metadata or text of a document.
  2. The large colourful tiles are a starting point to quickly go to hubs of the most important and often searched documents in our collection. These hubs often link to more ‘sub-hubs’ with further collections of documents, but using this approach relies on the collections of most important documents which we have collated (and continue to collate). This will not necessarily show you ALL the documents which may relate to particular topics. Use search approaches (1) or (3) to ensure that you are presented with all relevant documents matching your search.
  3. You can use the ‘tag cloud’ to search the entire database for any documents which are tagged with particular subjects. The tag cloud also gives an indication (by the size of the words) of which subjects are most often used within the whole collection.

 

Once you have done a search the system presents you with a list, which may contain both individual documents and document ‘hubs’ (which contain information and a further list of individual documents or ‘sub-hubs’).

When you find the document you are looking for in a list of documents, click on the picture or title of the document to display the actual text of the document. You can move through the document page by page. If you have searched for particular words, they will be highlighted within the document. There are a number of controls/icons on this page which allow you to do things like zooming, displaying the document in ‘presentation mode’, going directly to different pages etc. Please play around and experiment to discover the many things uHub will allow you to do.

To the left of the document, under a heading “Tools”, the first symbol will enable you to download the document – if you are given a few options for downloading, “Download the Web Master” is the one which will download the whole document to your computer. Please note that unfortunately this 'Download' button will not display on a phone - you will need to use an iPad or a PC/Mac to access the download button. We are working on a fix for this which will involve scrolling to the bottom of the page on a phone where you will find a "Download Link" heading and "Download" button, but this link has to be individually set up for each document, so it will take time and we will prioritise documents downloaded more frequently.

 

FURTHER TIPS:

The more words you put in the search box, the more accurately illuminate will be able to find the specific document for which you are looking. Sometimes more words may give you a greater number of results in the list but the documents which include all those words will be highest in the list. Usually, using more words will give you a smaller more accurate list.

For example, if you search for ‘code’, you will (at the time of writing this!) get a list of 504 documents including the UCA Code of Ethics for Ministers, the Code of Conduct for Lay Leaders and Justice documents related to health codes. On the other hand, if you type ‘code of ethics’ you will get 322 documents, most of which are versions of our Ministry Code of Ethics or refer to it. Finally, if you type ‘code of ethics lay preachers’, you will get a list of 164 documents with the Code of Ethics for Lay Preachers being the first in the list.

Once you’ve done a search, changing the setting under the “Search for” button from “All Keywords” to “Any Keywords” will give a broader search showing documents with any of the terms you entered. On the other hand “Exact Phrase Match” will narrow your search to documents with all of the search words together in order as a phrase.

The ‘Refine Search Terms’ button lets you add or exclude extra terms and search again.

If you have a long list of documents, you can cut down that list by using the leftmost column to add ‘Filters’ for particular dates, types of documents, status settings, etc.

 

Registration:

Note that the 'Login' icon to the left will offer you the possibility of registering to become a 'member'. The ONLY benefits of membership are that illuminate will keep a history of the searches made during your current session, and will allow you to store a list of documents you are interested in as "Your collection". This may be useful for researchers, but most users of illuminate will not gain anything by registering. All documents and all search capabilities are freely available to any visitor without registration.

If you are looking for documents of an historical nature, you might also wish to search the Camden Theological Library's Illuminate site which has a fuller collection of historical and theological documents connected to the Uniting Church.