On this page:

• How to explore all public archives
• How to explore the collections of a specific partner organization
• How to explore a specific collection
• Using search
• Searching metadata
• Searching full-text

How to explore all public archives

Visitors may browse and search among the contents of all of your public collections in the "Explore" section of our website, which provides a search function that will return text matched to collecting organization, collections, archived sites, and the contents of individual archived web pages:

 

 

You can filter the results of such searches by the facets that appear in our site's left-hand sidebar. By default, the facets include things like the type and name of relevant collecting organizations and collections. For collection and site results, these facets also include your custom metadata.

 

How to explore the collections of a specific partner organization

Patrons, the general public, and your account's users can all explore organizations with publicly accessible archives by typing the name of the organization into the "Explore Organizations" search bar on our website's home page:

 

 

Suggested matches will appear as you type, and you can select an option from the matches to go to that organization's page. Alternatively, you may click the "Show All Organizations" link in order to see a list of all organizations sharing public collections with Archive-It. Any organization that wishes to do so may be featured in the carousel shown above. You may click the orange arrows to the left and right of the organizations in the carousel to browse more.  If you want your organization to be listed, just be sure to add a logo image and organization description for your account.

 

 

Using any of these methods, you may access your chosen organization's dedicated space on our website, which provides descriptive information about the organization, provides search and browse capabilities for their archives in Wayback, and enables faceted browsing with their chosen collection and document level metadata.

 

How to explore a specific collection

Patrons, the general public, and your account's users can all explore the contents of publicly accessible collections by typing the name of the collection into the "Explore Collections" search bar on our website's home page:

 

 

Suggested matches will appear as you type. Alternatively, visitors may click the "Show All Collections" link in order to see a list of all public collections in Archive-It. Featured collections are displayed in the carousel below, with an image, title, and description for each. Click the orange arrows to the right and left of the featured collections to browse other featured collections.  If you would like one of your collections to be included as a Featured Collection, please contact us, and remember to include an image and short description.

 

 

Using any of these methods, you can click to visit a collection page, which includes collection-level descriptive metadata as well as search and browse capabilities at the seed and document levels. The facets that appear in the left-hand sidebar can be used to filter results.

Using search

Searching metadata

Use the search box to find keywords or phrases in collection metadata, seed metadata, or within the text of your archived pages. You are searching metadata when you're on the Collecting Organizations, Collections, or Sites tabs.

Searching full-text

You can perform a full text search from the public archive-it.org site by clicking on the "Search Page Text" tab, either from the "Explore" page, which will allow you to search the full text of all partners' collections, or from a specific collecting organization or collection page.

Entering a search term in the main search box will allow you to do a basic keyword search, whereas the Advanced Search Options on the left allow you to further refine the scope of your search. For more information on the Advanced Search Options see below.

Full-text advanced search options

In addition to basic full text search there are also advanced search options:

• With all of the words: As with the basic search, the first advanced search option is to search for results with all keyword terms
• In collection: Allows you to select multiple collections to search across
• With the exact phrase: Displays only results that match an exact phrase
• With none of the words: Displays only results that include none of the designated words
• From the host: Displays only results from the designated host
• Total documents per host: While the default is to display only one document (file) per host, with an option to view more results from a host, you can modify that to show 5, 10, 25 or unlimited documents from a host.
• With the file format: Displays only results with a specific file type. File types that are not indexed for full text search (images, videos, etc.) are not on this list.
• With a capture date from: Displays only those results captured in a specified date range.The first two drop down menus let you specify the month and year of the earliest results you would like displayed. The second two drop down menus let you specify the month and year of the latest results you would like displayed.
  • To view all results after a specific month/year, leave the second set of drop downs blank.
  • To view all results before a specific month/year, leave the first set of drop downs blank.
  • To view results from just one specific month/year, select the same values for both sets of drop downs.

You can also use advanced search options by adding the query formats below to your search terms:

• Default is AND: so Pope Rome will search all documents with Pope and Rome only
• Minus: Pope -Rome will only present search results for documents with Pope but without the term Rome
• Exact Phrase: put quotes around the exact phrase you want to search for, so for example:  "Pope Rome" will return only results with that exact text string in them

Full-text search results

For full-text search of archived pages, one result will show for each host archived within your collection(s), by default. Clicking the "Show all results for this host" link at the bottom of each search result will retrieve more results from each host.