Philadelphia Inquirer / DAILY NEWS DocCenter Web user guide Revised 7/17/02 1. What’s new: All DocCenter pages have a new look and feel. The enter key now works to log on or execute a query. Searches are sorted in rank order by default. The cursor is active in the logon, generic, text and image pages when they load, so you can just start to type. The system will e-mail results of story searches. Click E-mail to self and it will be sent to your PNI email account. E-mail to others lets you type in addresses of others. A Quick Search field lets you type the search phrase and click go (the “enter” key works) without having to call a new query form to the screen. A “Save query as:” field can be used to name searches, so you can find them later. All searches are saved under Personal Queries where they can be rerun, renamed, edited and deleted. Click Personal Queries to open the list. There is now a proximity operator for word distance (e.g. /3 = within three words). 2. To connect: For best results use Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, and Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 or higher (for viewing pages). Connect to http://doccenter/ (Outside PNI’s network, http://doccenter.phillynews.com/ gets you all the functionality available inside the network except for refining or combining queries.) At the Login screen, enter your Hermes user name and password. Press “enter” or click the “go” button to complete the process. 3. Search screen forms: Query forms are Generic (the default), Text only, Images only, Pages only, Death Notices, and Expert search. Selecting a new form changes the form dynamically. Page 1 of 4 Printed 7/17/2002 4. Dates: The default search is for both Inquirer and Daily News. It also is for all years in the archive (back to 1981 for Inquirer stories, 1978 for Daily News). Pre-set date buttons are available for the last Week, Month, Year, 2002, 2001, 2000 and 1999. Single-digit Month and Day values are accepted, but years need four digits. Press tab and shift-tab to move among fields. A warning about date ranges: Narrow searches (up to a couple of years) work fine. For broader ranges, your search will be faster if you do not specify any dates. 5. Defining a search: Make searches as specific as practical. The DocCenter search engine will undertake any query, but it will time out and you’ll get no return if the results are too large or require too much filtering. By default, multiple words are treated as phrases. To search for combinations of terms, use these command characters: Character Meaning & And , (comma) Or ! not / word proximity // paragraph proximity What about searches that might involve those characters? Like “Hello, Dolly!” or “Sears, Roebuck & Co.”? Just skip the commas, ampersands and exclamation marks. Using them can get you unpredictable results. As you do searches that include periods and hyphens, you’ll see they disappear from the screen. Don’t worry about it … the database simply ignores them. Except for the “Expert search” form, all fields are anded together. In other words, specifying a byline of Howie Shapiro and a headline of Istanbul will return only stories written by Howie and with Istanbul in the headline. Press enter or click to execute your search. 6. Examples: george bush finds “President George Bush” and “George W. Bush” but also finds “George Washington chopped down a cherry bush.” george & bush finds anything containing both “george” and “bush” george, bush finds anything with either “george” or “bush” george ! bush finds anything containing “george” except those also containing “bush” george & bush /4 finds George Bush, George H. Bush, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. george & bush //3 finds any story with “george” and “bush” within three paragraphs of each other. (president, george w.) bush finds either “president bush” or “george w. bush" 7. Displaying your results: The default view for results is Thumbnail List. Other choices are Thumbnails and List mode. To change the display of your query results, click on the Result View dropdown list and select an alternative. Your choice takes effect immediately. At the top of either List or Thumbnail List you’ll see several sort options: Date, Byline, Headline, Section, Page Number. Click on any of them to redisplay your search in a different order. Byline is purely alphabetical … By Andy Zschoche sorts ahead of By Sue Adams. Section Page 2 of 4 Printed 7/17/2002 examples are “Business” and “Sports” not “A” and “B”. A “Sort order:” dropdown box at screen bottom allows “Rank order” results as well as chronological and reverse. 8. Viewing query results: Left-click the icon associated with a result to open the story, photo or page in a separate window. 9. Printing: DocCenter uses the printers set up for other windows programs on your machine. With the story, picture or page open on your screen, click the printer icon in the top right corner of the window, type Ctrl-P (the standard print command) or right-click the window and choose “print.” 10. Tools: The tools panel lets you create a new query, re-run an existing one, rename an existing one, combine two or more selected queries, delete old queries, and modify previous queries. If you don’t see a list of previous searches, click Personal Queries. Click the search you want to use, then the appropriate tool. To revise a query, click advanced. To combine queries, select them (shift-click for queries that are together, or control-click for queries that are not) and click combine. Or adds the results together. And selects only items that match both sets of criteria. Not subtracts the results of the second query from the results of the first. Unnamed searches (which show up as things like NOT SECTION PH LIKE) will purge automatically. Giving a search a name will preserve it. Select the query, click rename and type the new name in the open field. You’ll need to delete the default name. 11. Refining a search: Select the item under Personal Queries that you want to refine. By default, it’s the last search you executed. Click new under the Tools section. Click the Refine checkbox on the right side of the screen under the “thesaurus” button. Enter your refining terms and execute the search. When the query returns, there will be a new entry in the services pane under your previous query. This function is not available outside the PNI network. 12. Pages: Search for pages by newspaper, publication date, section letter or page number (including section letter for The Inquirer). Section names are pretty much the names we use: sports, business, features. 13. Pictures: To find pictures and the stories they ran with, use a generic search, select both text and photo, and enter your search terms in the published caption field. 14. Exporting to Hermes: To export a picture from DocCenter, click on the picture thumbnail, then click the export button in the view window. You can send the picture to Hermes or WireCenter. Complete the appropriate form and click the appropriate Export button. To put short excerpts of text into Hermes, cut and paste from the DocCenter display into Hermes. No stray coding will land in Hermes. However, quotation marks do not work properly. You’ll need to replace the straight quotes with curvy ones. Page 3 of 4 Printed 7/17/2002 15. What things mean: Nearly all the fields in the query forms are backed up by indexes of the database. When the cursor is in an indexed field, the index button will turn greenish. Clicking it will shows how many times the term is indexed for that field. This button works only inside the PNI network. The thesaurus button behaves the same way, but applies only to the keyword field. Field names pretty much mean what they are called. Some have added meanings: • Text: Full text of the story • Byline: Yep. The writer’s name. • Credit: Photo credit • Edition: The Hermes edition name: City-B, Jersey-C, etc. • Headline: Story head and subhead • Index terms: Search terms added by the news research staff • Lead graph: First paragraph of the story • Memo: Usually things that appear in labels over stories and columns: newsmakers, women’s basketball. • Page: The actual page number: A01, etc. • Photographer: Full name of photographer • Publication: Inquirer, Daily News, or both. • Published caption: For stories, the captions of accompanying pictures. For pictures, the published caption. • Record ID: A number: the unique identifier for each object in the system. • Section: For stories, things like “national,” “sports” and “death notices”. For Inquirer pages, the section letter. • Section letter: For The Inquirer, the page section letter like “A”, “B”, “C”. • Source: Originator of photo. For Inquirer, indicates bureau as well. • Source caption: The IPTC photo caption. 16. Timeout, Log off, etc. DocCenter will time out and log you off if you are inactive for something like a half hour. You’ll know it’s happened when you try to do something and get a screen that says Timeout Expired. It has a Login button that takes you back to the opening screen, so you no longer have to quit and reconnect to DocCenter. Page 4 of 4 Printed 7/17/2002