Browsing and Searching

Connecting Africa can be searched for experts, digital resources, organizations or all records together. Alternatively, experts and organizations can be browsed by clicking on a letter in the A-Z indexes on these pages.

The default search screen “All records” retrieves records from the entire datastore. For example, entering kamer in the search box will find an expert, an organisation and a publication record that contains the word kamer. To restrict your search to specific part of the datastore choose the tabcards “Find expertise”, “digital resources” and “organisations”.

Searches can made using single words or whole phrases.
If you enter more than one word in a search box, this will retrieve records which contain all of these words (default search operator = AND). For example, entering Cameroon dance in the search box will find records that contain both words: Cameroon and dance.

Use quotation marks to search for a phrase, e.g., entering “dance mask” in the search box search for records that have the word dance followed by the word mask.

Searching tips

  • Boolean operators: You can combine your search terms with the Boolean operators AND, OR or NOT to help you get the results you want.
    The OR operator: To increase the chance of finding a record that matches your query, you can use the OR operator in combination with synonyms or related terms. For example, enter football OR soccer in the search field. The OR operator finds records that match at least one, if not all, of the terms in the query. You may, for example, find records containing soccer, but not football.
    The AND operator: You can narrow down a search by combining search terms using the AND operator. The AND operator searches records that match all the terms in the query.
    The NOT operator: To exclude words you don't want to appear in the records choose the NOT operator.
    Nested queries: If you want to nest query terms within other query terms, you have to use parentheses to specify the order in which search terms and operators should be interpreted. Information within parentheses is read first, and information outside parentheses is read next. For example, if you enter (football OR soccer) AND Botswana in the search field, the search engine will retrieve records containing the word football or the word soccer together with the word Botswana.
  • Word Variations: Use an asterisk with a word stem to find variations on the word, e.g., searching for civ* will match civ, civil, civic, civilization, and civilian.
  • Capitalization: Capitalization is ignored, e.g., Consequence and consequence are searched the same way.

Sorting

You cannot yet choose how you want to sort your search results. Sort options are part of our planned improvements for 2008.

Search results

When you find a record in Connecting-Africa, you can click on the link Full text to access the digital resource (full-text of publications, images and sound) if there is a digital resource in the original repository. Connecting-Africa relies on the content of the repositories it harvests (The link to Full text is created whenever there is content in dc:format, a field which is often not or not consistently filled in).

Some characteristics of the tabcards Find expertise, digital resources and organisations

  • Find expertise: Use this tabcard to search for Dutch or Belgian Africa experts.
    You can choose different search fields from the drop-down menu:
    All fields: Select All fields if you want to search different parts of records simultaneously, such as geographic and thematic expertise.
    Name: Select Name if you are searching for a specific expert.
    Profession: Select Profession if you want to browse a specific expert group (policymakers, development practitioners etc.).
    Thematic expertise: Select Thematic expertise if you are searching for an expert with a specific thematic expertise.
    Geographical expertise: Select Geographical expertise if you are searching for an expert who specializes in a specific country or region.
    Combined search: Select Combined search if you want to combine a number of search fields.
  • Digital resources: Use this tabcard to search for bibliographic information and digital resources (digitized books and articles, audio files, images etc).
    You can choose different search fields from the drop-down menu.
    All fields: Select All fields if you want to search different parts of the records simultaneously, such as title, keyword and summary.
    Title: Select Title if you want to search the titles of books, articles, journals or audio files.
    Author/Creator: Select Author if you are searching for a specific author/creator. This field will also look for contributors.
    Keyword: Select Keyword if you want to search subjects used by the resource publisher (or author) to classify the resource.
    Combined search: Select Combined search if you want to combine a number of search fields.
    To restrict your search result to digital resources, check box digital resources only.
  • Organizations: Use this tabcard to search for details of Dutch and Belgian organizations or institutes involved in African Studies or projects.
    You can choose different search fields from the drop-down menu:
    All fields: Select All fields if you want to search different parts of records simultaneously, such as name and city.
    Name: Select Name if you are searching for a specific organization or want to browse the list of organizations.
    City: Select City if you want to search for organizations by location.
    Combined search: Select Combined search if you want to combine a number of search fields.