Direct access the the Archaeology Data Services website archive is available CLICK HERE

The ADS collection DOI reference is CLICK HERE https://doi.org/10.5284/1032950

For the guide to using Transactions Search CLICK HERE

IMPORTANT NOTE, the index used when searching these articles has been created either from Optically Scanned Documents or after 2000 from the orginal PDF files used for printing. In both cases there may be inaccuracies and not all words in a document are in the index. What you see when downloading an article is actually a photograph of the page, so it is totally accurate to the printed version, however the underlying text may not be identical. This does not happen very often but users of the search should be aware that there is the possibility that when searching, a document that should match the search may not be located. If you find such omissions then please report them to the Webmaster so the index can be manually corrected.

When using the 'Find articles that contain all words' or 'Find articles containing any of the words' options you must only use plain words, do not rely on any logical operators as these are just stripped out in this mode. You can use Google Style Logical Operators provided that is selected, but please note that at present this is limited and you can only use the * + - ~ and <> operators, using brackets () or quotes " will not currently work because of the way the search is conducted via an abridged index. Work is still in hand to try and improve this search option.

To save load on the server, the search facility will not search for any word less than 3 characters. If you try and search for a 2 letter word for example, nothing will be returned.

To prevent hacking all punctuation is stripped out of search terms, hyphens, apostophes, etc. are all removed. Efforts have been made so that hyphenated words, plurals, possessives will be located and work is continuing on this. It is probable that some terms may not be found, please always try and search with alpha-characters only, and try different combinations.

There is now only one database but you are able to search either just for Authors and Titles or do a full search of the whole text.

The following inputs can be made to make your search : [Note this refers to the advanced search panel, if using the basic search panel you can only enter the Words to be found, the required year, and the year range, or you can display the contents of a particular year. When doing a basic search it is an AND search which means it looks for articles containing all the words specified.]

Enter words to be found here : In this box type the words you wish to locate, you can use the limited logical operators, case does not matter. Note that at the moment only an exact search is possible so mis-spelt words will not be found even plurals, so for example a search on Hadrian will not find Hadrian's and a search on Hadrian's will not find Hadrian, work is in hand to improve on this, but it will be subject to the server being able to handle the additional load presented by more complex searches.

Type of Search: This is the drop down selection available on the same line as the above input, you can choose to find only those articles that have all the words in them, or the articles that have any of the words in them (this will produce many more results), or chose the free form input using your own logical operators in the same way you can search on Google though note the restrictions for this. The following operators can be used in 'Google' mode.
+ operator means the word immediately following must be in the article
- operator means the word immediately following must not be in the article
~ operator means the word immediately following is reduced in significance. Useful for moving down the result without eliminating it
<> These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a result. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it.
* The asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Unlike the other operators, it is appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator. So jane* would match jane and janet, j* would match any word beginning with j.
The double quote ( "e; "e;) and parentheses grouping() methods will not work due to the way the database is contructed to minimise use of the server.

Enter Words to be excluded from the search here : Typing a word in here will exclude any entry that contains that word, even if it contains the wanted words. You can use this to refine searches that have produced a lot of entries with a topic you are not interested in.

Exclude Indexes/Content from search : This box will be selected by default and prevents the search from looking in files that are purely an index or member list as this will tend to produce duplicate entries for the same search term. If you wish to also search these documents then just change the selection. This should be used sparingly due to the additional load it places on the server.

Enter the required year here : If you leaved this blank then ALL years will be searched. If you put a year here then the search will be limited to that year only unless you select a year range from the drop down selection menu to the right of this year entry on the same line. If you enter a year and do not select anything then the exact year only will be searched. If you for example enter 1967 and select +/- 10 years from the drop down list then you will search everything from 1957 to 1977. You can significantly reduce the search time and results obtained by entering a year and range.

Search the Full Document Contents : From this drop down selection you can chose what you will search and the options are to either search the full contents which is the default or to search Titles and Authors Only which can be selected if required.

Exclude Cross References from search. Several indexes in the older volumes contained a cross reference index to help find terms that may have been indexed under a different name. These will not be included by default as in general they tend to provided a lot of matches that are not very useful to most people. You do however have the option of including these references by making the appropriate selection.

Important note : All these indexes have been created from scanned copies of the Transactions. There are therefore possible errors due to the scanning and optical character reading techniques used. It is not known at this time whether will be any further proof reading of the index, if you do find errors then please report them using the 'Report Error' button provided at the top right of each displayed entry. Note however that the summeries displayed are in general just the first few lines of the relevant articles, they do contain errors but unfortunately at this time it is not practical to make corrections to these unless they are serious, only corrections to titles, authors and volume/page details can be done.

The score displayed when carrying out a full contents search is based on the number of times the word(s) you are searching for have been found. So for example if you search on the single word Hadrian and the score is 93 then that means that word was found 93 times in that article. If however you search on Hadrians Wall then if it finds Hadrians 54 times and Wall 37 times in the same article the score will be 91 i.e the sum of the two numbers.

No search will locate words of less than 3 characters.