How to use the database

Clicking on

Search the database

brings you to the search screen which consists of two main areas:

Browse the following lists:

and

Search database:

The former lets you browse in dynamically generated lists, whereas the latter presents you with fields for inputting search terms. For quick orientation about the content of the database there are four lists you can browse: list of authors, list of titles, list of incipits, list of press marks.

A search via search fields is a little more complicated. The main area of this portion of the screen consists of a number of input fields, i. e. the place where you type in the actual search terms. To the left of each input field there are popup menus where you can choose the fields in the database you would like to search. Each of these popup menus displays a default field name. On the first one you will see "Press mark", on the second "Author" and so on. If you click on one of the popup menus you can choose from a list of searchable fields. If you already see the name of the field you would like search you can just go to that line and input your search term. You don´t have to start in the 1st field.

The list of searchable fields is as follows (field names in the following list that appear in a bold font can be considered as core fields):

Ms.Code A unique number assigned internally to every textdescription in the database.

City The name of the place in which the library is situated.

Library The name of the library.

Shelfmark The current press mark of the manuscript, and, when known, former press marks.

Author The author of a text and other important names related to this text.

Title The more or less standardised title of a text or the title under which a text is generally known.

Incipit The incipit(s) or other initial text parts.

Explicit The explicit or other closing text parts.

Contents The table of contents, if one is provided by the text.

Century The century in which the text was composed.

Year The year in which the text was composed.

Language The language in which the text was written.

Subject

Place of origin

Owner's notes

Previous owner(s)

TK Column number in Thorndike & Kibre: A Catalogue of Incipits ...

You can use the following wildcards in the search fields:

' . ' (period) or ' _ ' (underscore) for one character,
' * ' (asterisk) or ' % ' (percent sign) for any number of characters. Entries in separate entry fields are connected with 'AND'; boolean 'OR' within a field can be indicated by '|'.

We strongly recommend to make frequent use of wildcard searches, in particular for name and title searches, because these are not yet standardized in this version.

The Search button starts the search and the Reset button clears the entry fields of any previous input.

At the right hand side of the screen, just above the search entry fields there is another popup menu, called "Output format" that enables you to choose the amount of information a successful search will produce. The default value in this popup menu is "Short form". That means that the result of a search will only show you the most basic information about a text - just enough to identify it, i. e. the unique internal number of this text, the names of the city and library, the shelfmark, the name of the author and additional names, and the title. The other choices are:

Whole Ms. General description of the manuscripts found with all texts contained in them.

Ms. and Text Information about a single text found together with general description of the manuscript in which it is contained.

Text Information about a single text found together with basic information on the manuscript in which it is contained.

Please report any problems to: jordanus@lrz.uni-muenchen.de