Page by Page Guide

Getting Started

Selection Criteria
Browsers
My ArchiveThe ship captain's medical guide, 1946
Register/Log In
Adding Material to My Archive
My Bookshelf
My Lightbox 

Documents

Overview and Browsing
Thematic Guides
Document Details Page
Download Options and Printing
Viewing the Original Image
Share Functionality

Searching

Basic Search
Handwritten Text Recognition technology (HTR)
Advanced Search
Boolean Functionality
Search Directories
Search Results
Viewing Search Results

Image Galleries

Visual Galleries
Object Gallery

Explore

Medical Developments
Biographies
Essays
External Links

Research Tools

The Nightingale Papers
The Fleming Papers
Surviving the Civil War
Wounded in Action
The Guinea Pig Club
Chronology

Further Resources

Archive Explorer
RefWorks/EndNote/Zotero
OpenURLs

Getting Started

 

Selection Criteria

Background information on the development, selection and scope of the collections included in Medical Services and Warfare is contained in the Selection Criteria found under the Introduction tab.

Browsers

Medical Services and Warfare is optimised to use the following browsers: Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer 10 and 11, and the latest releases of Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome.

My Archive

Click the link in the top right-hand corner to register for 'My Archive' or log in. If registering for the first time, enter details into the form provided. Your first name and last name will be displayed on the site once you have logged in. A link to the privacy policy is included at the bottom of the form.

 

Register/Log In

'My Archive' enables you to register login details and benefit from a range of bespoke features that allow you to create your own personalised collection. Signing up is easy. Click on the 'Register' link and submit your login details.

Adding Material to My Archive

Once you have logged in, you will be able to:

  • Save selected documents to 'My Bookshelf'
  • Save any image from the collection to 'My Lightbox'
  • Run a slideshow of your lightbox images
  • Save search results

Every document, search result and individual image in Medical Services and Warfare is tagged with the relevant 'Add to My Archive/Lightbox' button. To return to any document without the need to browse or search every time, click on the 'Add to My Archive' button and it will automatically be stored in your individual account.

My Bookshelf

Click the 'My Lightbox' or 'My Archive' links in the top right-hand corner to enter these features.

Once in 'My Archive' you can edit your profile, navigate to 'My Lightbox', view saved searches and saved documents.

Click on a saved search term to view the saved search results. Click on thumbnails in 'My Bookshelf' to view your saved documents.

 

My Lightbox

You can organise the images in 'My Lightbox' at any time by creating a new lightbox. Enter the name of your new lightbox in the box beside 'Create a New Lightbox:' and click 'Create'. Use the tick boxes beside each image to select the images you wish to copy to your new lightbox. In the 'Image Options' menu, click 'Copy selection to another lightbox' to copy the selected images.

You can view your selection of images as a slideshow and export as PDFs by selecting these options from the 'Image Options' menu.

 

 

Documents

 

 

Overview and Browsing

Browse the documents in Medical Services and Warfare by clicking on the Documents tab. This shows a grid of all documents split by theme. Go directly to documents tagged with that theme by clicking on the thumbnail, or refine further by ‘Conflict’, 'Document Type' or 'Library/Archive'. The grid will automatically reorder to show the theme with the most documents first.

To view all the documents in a list format, select the 'List View' tab.

Documents are loaded 200 to a page, in alphabetical order by title and can be scrolled through. You can use the options on the left to refine the list by selecting one or multiple options from ‘Conflict’, 'Document Type', or 'Library/Archive'. Use the 'clear filter' option to return to the default alphabetical list.

From this page you can sort the order of each column and also select the display of the last column to feature either ‘Organisation’, ‘Institution’ or ‘Countries’.

Navigation between pages is available at the top right of the list. Browse previous and next pages, select a page number or select a letter from the alphabetical list.

View document details pages for each item by clicking on the thumbnail or document title in the list.

Printed full text searchable documents are indicated with the following icon:  

HTR searchable documents are indicated with the following icon: 

 

Thematic Guides

Every document in Medical Services and Warfare has been indexed by one or more key themes. When browsing by theme, you can read a short introduction to each, including the kinds of documents included and links to items to start your research:

 Additional themes for 1928-1949:

Document Details Page

Click on a document thumbnail or title in the document list to view the 'Document Details' page. This provides thumbnail images from the document, full bibliographic information, document-level indexing data and the ability to view original images or select some, or all, of the document to download.

Scroll through thumbnails to select and view images.

Use the 'next' and 'previous' buttons to show the next or previous document details page. Use the back arrow beside the 'next' and 'previous' buttons to go back to the document list.

Download the full document as a PDF or download a range of pages using the PDF drop-down selection boxes.

Where available, some additional 'Chapter', 'Section' or 'Visual Highlights' information will be displayed underneath the metadata.

From this page you can also add the document to 'My Archive' and export the bibliographic details of each document to RefWorks, EndNote or Zotero citation software.

 

Download Options and Printing

For the best-quality printout, it is recommended that you download the required image or images as a PDF. Within the 'Document Details' and the image-viewing pages there are several printing options. From the 'Document Details' page you can download the entire contents of the document or specify a page or image range as a PDF document, which can then be saved to file or printed. The image or page numbers available will be displayed in a drop-down box. Click on the required image/page to select the range to be downloaded.

When a page range is provided, there can be a number of 'unpaginated' images listed at the start of those available to download. These images can also be selected to download as each 'unpaginated' page listed still represents an image, but one without a printed page number. For example, if there are six 'unpaginated' images listed and you want to download them all, simply select the first image listed in the drop-down box and then select the sixth 'unpaginated' image listed in the second drop-down box.

From the image view, you can download the current page you are viewing or, where available, specific chapters as a PDF document. Clicking on these options will open a new window for the PDF to download. Please remember when downloading entire documents that many of the files will be quite large and can take some time. You will require Adobe Reader for this facility, which can be downloaded for free by clicking here.

 

Viewing the Original Image

Clicking on the thumbnail, title, section or chapter will generate the image-viewing screen. Increase or decrease the magnification of the original image by using the plus  or minus symbols in the top left-hand corner of the image-viewer window.

To move around the image, drag the document by holding down the left mouse button and then moving the mouse to the preferred view. The mouse wheel can also be used to zoom in and out.

The expand  icon will open the image viewer in full screen.

The rotate  icon will rotate the image, which will resize to fit the screen view.

Browse through the images using the 'next' and 'previous' buttons or select a page from the drop-down list.

There are various ways to navigate through a document and you can also download images to print or save. Where available, some printed documents will have additional navigation features such as jumping to the next chapter or selecting a specific page number.

Clicking on the 'Thumbnails' tab will display all the thumbnails for the document.

 

Share Functionality

By clicking on the 'Share'  button in the top right-hand corner of the page, you can share the page you are viewing via email and social-networking sites.

 

Searching

Basic Search

A basic keyword search box is available on all screens in the top right-hand corner. Type in your search term and either click on 'Go' or press enter. You can also integrate your searches with 'Boolean' text for more advanced queries.

Underneath the basic search box are links to the 'Advanced Search' option as well as a list of 'Search Directories'.

Handwritten Text Recognition Technology (HTR)

Medical Services and Warfare includes more than 5,000 manuscript letters and notes from the Florence Nightingale Papers and 37 of Alexander Fleming's scientific notebooks, which are now fully text searchable thanks to Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology.

HTR searchable documents are indicated with the following icon: 

Handwritten Text Recognition technology (HTR) FAQs

What is HTR?

Handwritten Text Recognition is a technology that aims to deliver full-text search results for handwritten documents. The software behind this technology employs artificial intelligence and probability, which does not rely on transcripts, to produce very effective full-text search results.

How do I know that a document can be searched using HTR?

All HTR-searchable documents have a pencil icon next to them on the Documents and Search Results lists, and everything in the Florence Nightingale Papers from the British Library that aren’t printed have been processed through the HTR software.

Can I see a transcript of the manuscript material?

HTR technology does not produce transcripts. The methodology used takes a different approach to identifying search terms based on artificial intelligence and probability. The result is a marked improvement in the accuracy of highlighted results over transcript-reliant systems.

Can I search the entire collection using HTR?

All documents marked with the pencil icon can be searched using HTR via the 'Search the text of this document' field. A basic site-level search or search from Search Directories will search the very detailed metadata that Adam Matthew's editorial team has assigned to each document. If there is a hit in a document's metadata for the term searched for, then the HTR software will automatically search for that term in the full text of that document if a user selects the document from the Search Results list.

Can I use phrase-searching for HTR?

Yes. You can search for phrases when searching individual HTR documents. However, note that you should not enclose the phrase in quotation marks: just type it as is.

Can I use Boolean operators like AND or OR?

Boolean operators are not currently supported. The HTR software searches for the entered search term exactly, so a search for war AND peace will search for all three words together, not war and peace as two terms occurring separately in the same document.

 

Advanced Search

The Advanced Search page enables you to search for several keywords or phrases using the AND, OR and NOT Boolean operators. Extra fields can be added using the plus  button.

TIP: Use of these drop-down operators still follow the Boolean rules of precedence.

A date-range restriction can be entered. This can be used in conjunction with a keyword or other restricted searches, or across all documents by leaving the other fields blank.

Searches can also be restricted by ‘Conflict’, ‘Document type’, ‘Themes and 'Library/Archive'.

 

Boolean Functionality

Boolean Operators

The keyword search supports the Boolean operators AND, OR and AND NOT between keywords. Using the terms ‘royal’ and ‘nursing’ as examples:

To return results in which both ‘royal and ‘nursing’ appear, use AND between terms (TIP: The search engine already does this by default – see section on 'Automatic AND Queries').

To return results which have either ‘royal’ or ‘nursing’, add OR between terms.

To return results in which ‘royal’, but not ‘nursing’ appear, add AND NOT between terms. This will search for ‘royal’ but exclude any pages which also include ‘nursing’.

TIP: You can use either upper or lower case for Boolean terms.

Automatic AND Queries

By default, the search engine only returns results which contain all your keywords. The search engine automatically uses the AND operator, so there is no need to use this when searching for multiple terms.

TIP: To broaden or refine the keyword search, try using fewer or more terms.

Phrase Searching

By adding double quotation marks to your keywords you can search for exact phrases. Words enclosed in quotation marks (“American Red Cross”) will only return results in which the words appear next to each other.

Please note that if you perform a phrase search, the number of hits displayed will still appear as individual words (e.g. if the phrase “American Red Cross” appears on a page twice, the results will show four hits).

Wildcards

Wildcards allow you to search for parts of words, enabling you to widen your search criteria. The search engine supports two types of wildcards; "?" represents one character, and "*" represents any number of characters. For example, entering 'book?' will return results for books, but entering ‘nurs*' will return results for nurse, nurses, nursing etc. You can also use wildcards to search for words as part of a phrase.

Plurals

The search engine does not automatically find plurals of search terms. If you want to look for both book and books, use the 'Word Stemming' option under the 'Advanced Search' or the "*" wildcard.

Using Word Proximity Searches

The search engine will let you look for words or phrases that occur within a specified number of words of each other. This is a useful way of specifying the context in which words should occur. For example, a search for "royal w/3 nursing" may be a more accurate way of finding references to specific details than using a simple "AND" operator, but offers a broader net than that of a phrase search.

Word Stemming

By ticking the 'Word Stemming' option on the 'Advanced Search' page, you can command the search engine to return results on all derivations of your search word(s). Thus a stemming-enabled keyword search for 'book' will return book, books, booked, etc. However, it will not return different words that simply begin with book (e.g. bookseller, bookkeeper). For this, you need to use a wildcard.

 

Search Directories

There is a link to the Search Directories page beneath the basic search box, in the top right-hand corner of every page. 'Search Directories' provide lists of organisations, institutions and people and performs a search across the site for that term. The list is not exhaustive but represents the terms that have been included in the metadata, so is the best way to navigate the documents if you are interested in one of these categories.

 

Search Results

At the top of the search results page, you can select to filter results by 'Documents', 'Image Gallery' or 'Secondary Resources', or refine via ‘Conflict’, 'Document type', 'Themes' or 'Library/Archive',

Results can be exported as an email.

When selecting a document from the search results list, you will be taken to the 'Document Details' page, where further details of the result will be displayed.

Full text and HTR search results will be displayed with a list of the relevant sections from the original image with additional details of the image number and number of hits where relevant. Thumbnails that contain hits will be displayed with a red border in the slideshow at the top of the page and snippets will also appear at the bottom of the page. Results may also appear in the 'Visual Highlights Search Results' tab.

These results can be reordered by pages, relevance or number of hits. Click a snippet to view the result in this page.

To view the full document metadata click on the 'Show details' button at the top of the page. If there is a hit from the document-level metadata, then this will be highlighted.

TIP: If the document is returned in the search results with no full text hits, the metadata will be opened automatically.

 

Viewing Search Results

View the relevant image from the full text search results by selecting the link above the original image snippet (see above). You can view the document from the beginning by clicking on the thumbnail image.

Full text and HTR hits are highlighted in yellow on the original image.

Use the 'prev hit' and 'next hit' buttons above the image to browse to the next and previous hits within the document.

 

Image Galleries

Visual Galleries

 

Selected visual highlights from the documents have been individually indexed and grouped together into galleries, categorised by their image type.

Within each of the galleries you can refine further by the ‘Date’, ‘Image type’ and ‘Conflict’ filters.

To view a slideshow of images, select the ones you want to use via the tick box next to each title, then click 'Run slideshow of selection' from the 'Image Options' drop-down. Alternatively, you can save the selection for this session (hover over the 'Image Options' drop-down and click ‘Add Selection to My Lightbox'), or download the selection as a multi-page PDF.

TIP: The order that you select your images will be the order that they are played in the slideshow.

Images can be displayed in a list view with further details by selecting this view from the 'Display Options' drop-down menu.

To view a full-size version of the image, click on it. You can browse through the images by clicking the 'Next' and 'Previous' buttons, or by using the left and right arrows on your keyboard.

Metadata relating to the slideshow material can be searched in isolation via the 'Search Galleries' field.

 

Object Gallery

A range of fascinating objects from the Liddle Collection held at the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds, and the Musuem of Military Medicine, Surrey, UK are available in the object gallery. From the personal collections of veterans and their descendants, these First and Second World War artefacts include badges, medals, uniforms and medical equipment such as bandages and surgical instruments.

 

Explore

The Explore tab provides contextual information and new ways to approach the material in Medical Services and Warfare.

Medical Developments

The collections and documents selected for digitisation for Medical Services and Warfare highlight the fascinating progress in prevention, diagnosis and treatment from 1850-1949. This exhibition explores key advances in the science, equipment and delivery of battlefield medicine with links to primary source documents within the resource.

Click on the arrows to expand each entry and click on the image to view a larger version as well as link through to the original document.

 

Biographies

The biographies page highlights major figures from within the collections and those critical to the topics covered in the resource.

Using the alphabet bar, you can jump directly to specific entries, and click the title letter to return to the top of the page.

 

Essays

This section offers a selection of essays written by leading academics and collection specialists.

Many of the essays include hypertext links to the original documents. Clicking on a link will open a new window. If the link relates to a complete document, you will be taken to the 'Document Details' page from where you can browse the images. If the link relates to a specific page, you will be taken to the first relevant image. To return to the essay simply close or minimise the new window.

TIP: The print  icon will generate a printable version of the essay.

TIP: The PDF  icon will generate a PDF version.

 

External Links

The External Links option in the 'Explore' page provides a list of websites with important and interesting material on migration studies, along with a brief overview. Click on the link in the title of each site and it will open in a new window.

Please note that while every effort has been made to provide links to sites created by recognised institutions, Adam Matthew Group is not responsible for their content.

 

Research Tools 

The Nightingale Papers

The Florence Nightingale Papers from the British Library can be accessed through the full document list, as well as through this dedicated interactive browsing tool.

View the video guide for more on how to use the browsing tool and discover Nightingale’s letters and reports from this vital collection.

The Fleming Papers

The Alexander Fleming Papers from the British Library can be accessed through the full document list, as well as through this dedicated interactive browsing tool.

Surviving the Civil War

This interactive feature showcases a database of all the (known) patients treated in Frederick in the aftermath of the battle, reproduced with kind permission from Terry Reimer's book One Vast Hospital: The Civil War Hospital Sites in Frederick, Maryland after Antietam.

Read more about how to use the database or view the video guide.

Wounded in Action

Based on the three key conflicts covered by the documents in Medical Services and Warfare, Wounded in Action describes the experience of sustaining a gunshot wound in the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the First World War, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.

Discover how equivalent injuries were evacuated from the battlefield, treated on the frontlines and recovered from, and use the search terms to find relevant documents within the resource.

The Guinea Pig Club

This exhibition page tells the fascinating story of the pioneering plastic surgeio Archibald McIndoe and the Guinea Pig Club, a group of allied airmen who all underwent treatment by McIndoe at East Grinstead hospital, UK. The page brings together primary source content, and essay and video interview. 

Chronology

The interactive chronology charts significant moments in global conflicts, international relations and key medical developments including entries from the Red Cross societies, surgery and nursing.

Many entries have images and related documents. Click on the image to expand it or open in full screen view, and click the 'View related documents' button to explore the collection further.

 

Further Resources

Archive Explorer

Archive Explorer is a federated searching tool that gives you a quick and convenient way to search across all Adam Matthew collections. You will only be able to access document collections that your library is subscribed to. A link to 'Archive Explorer' is available on the footer of every page.

 

RefWorks/EndNote/Zotero

You can export the bibliographic details of each document to RefWorks, EndNote and Zotero if you have user rights to these systems. These options are available to you on the 'Document Details' page of each individual item. Just click the 'RefWorks', 'EndNote' or 'Zotero' logos, and a pop-up window with instructions will appear.

 

OpenURLs

OpenURLs connect you directly to your library catalogue, allowing you to easily access material recommended on this site. You will find OpenURLs on the essay pages. Click on the reference to send this item to your institution’s link resolver and establish the easiest way to access material that is not directly available on this site.

Please note that your institution must have registered their link-resolver details with Adam Matthew Digital for the OpenURL links to be visible and active.