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Re: searching free form text documents



We are using a program called dtSearch.  This indexes all the word
processing files in a given folder, file, drive, or where you specify.
It creates an index to all words so you can say find all documents
with the word Pensacola.   It does and these pop up in a window
showing where in the document that appears....we use this to
index our hundreds of individual collection inventories that are
in WordPerfect or Microsoft Word.   It will only do words that
appear in the document -- for example, you may want to search
the term Civil War ... it will only match those words, so if in your
text you simply say "South Carolina was the first to secede in
1860" ... the search engine is not going to find that because you
did not say "...secede in the Civil War in 1860".

It's a great program and you can download a trial version, I
believe, at www.dtsearch.com.    We have this on our staff
machines and on our public terminal...but we have only
occasionally shown users how to use it.  It takes longer to
teach the tool to them than to do the lookup ourselves.

Dean

Dean DeBolt
University Librarian
Special Collections and West Florida Archives
John C. Pace Library
University of West Florida
11000 University Parkway
Pensacola, FL  32514-5750
Tele:  850-474-2213;   Fax:  850-474-3338

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