Trove Tricks

Any long-term reader of this blog will know how much I love Trove.  Over the years I have spent a lot of time researching the site, the newspapers and gazettes especially, and found a great deal of information about various ancestors and their lives.  And all available free for anyone.

I had thought I was a fairly adept user of the Trove search facility and knew many of the tips and tricks for constructing searches : 

• Phrase searches  
• Enclose search terms in quotes, eg:  
• “James Clark"will find only articles with those words, together, in that order. 
  
• Wildcard searches 
• Specify wild cards or truncate word endings with an * , eg: 
• math*  will find math, maths, mathematics, mathematical etc
• Boolean searches 
• Use AND, OR and NOT and brackets to create boolean expressions. You can use a minus sign next to the word in place of NOT, eg: 
• "South Australia" AND (elections OR politics) NOT (Adelaide OR Kingston)  
• “Moreton Bay" -Brisbane

I use the phrase search especially frequently to find articles about my ancestors, but this search has a weakness.  Just searching James Clark will find any article with both words anywhere in the article.  The words can be several lines away from each other and thus returns a lot of irrelevant results.  Using the phrase search is much more exact, but it will miss out on a number of relevant articles as well.  My ancestor James Clark was often referred to using his middle name as well - James Nicholas Clark.  Researching all three names as a phrase returns different results, as does using initials, surname first, and so on.  So what phrase searches do I need to do to cover all the bases?  "James Clark", "James Nicholas Clark", "James N. Clark", "J T Clark", "Clark, James", "Clark, J T" - they all return different matches.

What I did not know until very recently, however, was the tilde symbol and how it could be used when searching Trove.

• Near searches
• Use the tilde symbol to find words close to each other
• "James Clark"~2 will find the words James and Clark within two words of each other in any order
  

So searching "James Clark"~2 will find "James Clark", "James Nicholas Clark", "James N. Clark", and "Clark, James" all in one search.  "J Clark"~2 will find "J Clark", "J T Clark", "Clark, J T".  

Using the various search methods certainly makes better use of my time and helps me be more efficient in my searching, and knowing about the tilde search is a wonderful addition to my skills.  It also makes me wonder what other search tricks I'm missing from my toolbox then I search Trove - and all the other databases out there that I use.