Page by Page Guide

Getting Started

Nature and Scope
Browsers
Thematic Guides
My Archive
Register/Log In
Adding material to My Archive
My Bookshelf
My Lightbox

Documents

Overview and Browsing
Document Details Page
Download Options, Saving, Rotating and Printing
Viewing the Original Image
Share

Searching

Basic Search
Boolean Functionality
Advanced Search
Search Directories
Search Results
Viewing Search Results

Explore

Essays
External Links
Video Interviews
Museum of Frontier Culture

Further Resources

Image Gallery
Map-Chronology
Archive Explorer
RefWorks/EndNote
OpenURL

 

 

 

 

Getting Started

Nature and Scope

Before looking at the documents, you may want to take a look at the Nature and Scope page to get a sense of what is contained within Frontier Life, Borderlands, Settlement & Colonial Encounters.

In addition to this, you may want to take a look at our videos of our academic consultants Talking Frontiers and read our Thematic Guides for the following areas that are covered by the collection.

Browsers

Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement & Colonial Encounters is optimised to use the following browsers: Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer 10 and 11, and the latest releases of Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome.

The interactive chronology is optimised for Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer 10 and 11 and the latest releases of Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome.

Thematic Guides

This section introduces several themes through the documents, containing links within the text to a small selection of documents in the collection. The Thematic Guides cover areas such as Business, Trade & Commerce; Agriculture & Livestock, Government & Politics and more.

My Archive

Click the link in the top header to register for My Archive or log in. If you are registering for the first time, enter your 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. Just click on the 'Register for My Archive' link on the front page of this website or click 'My Archive' in the header, submit your login details and off you go.

Adding material to My Archive

Once you've 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 your search results

Every document, search result and individual image in Frontier Life is tagged with the relevant 'Add to My Archive' button. To return to any document without the need to browse or search every time, simply click on the add button and it will automatically be stored in your individual account so you can return to it at any time.

My Bookshelf

Click the 'My Lightbox' or 'My Archive' links in the header to enter these features.

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

Click on a saved search term to view 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 labelled 'Create a New Lightbox:' and click 'Create'. Use the tick boxes below 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

Users can browse the documents in Frontier Life: Borderlands & Colonial Encounters by clicking on the Documents tab. This will take you to the document landing page. Clicking on one of the Theme panels will return a list of all the documents associated to that Theme. Here you can also browse by Region, Library/Archive or Document Type in combination with a theme. Once you have chosen your browse criteria (e.g. Region, Library of Document Type) click on a Theme panel if you want to browse documents within that category or List View if you want to browse without a particular Theme. Alternatively you can click the 'View all documents' panel to see everything.

When you have a list you can continue to use the filters to widen or narrow your criteria or view documents. You can view a document by clicking on the thumbnail or title. You can return a list of all the documents within a sub-collection by clicking on the Sub-collection title.

 

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 documents in the document list. 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.

Clicking on the words in the 'Sub-collection', 'Author', 'People', 'Places' and 'Subjects' will perform a search of all documents in the collection associated with that term.

 

Download Options, Saving, Rotating 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 you have 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' image listed still represents an image, but one without a written 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 or a particular chapter will generate the image-viewing screen. Increase or decrease the magnification of the original image by using the plusor minussymbols at the top 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 iconwill open the image viewer in full screen.

The rotate iconwill 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

By clicking on the 'Share'  button in the top right-hand corner of the page, you can bookmark and share the page you are viewing via a range of web-based resources 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 'Popular Searches'.

Boolean Functionality

Boolean Operators

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

To return results in which both ‘Mississippi’ and ‘trade’ 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 ‘Mississippi’ or ‘trade’, add OR between terms.

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

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 (“timber trade”) 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 “timber trade” 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 'book*' will return results for book, books, bookish, bookseller, 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 "Mississippi w/3 trade" 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.

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 follows 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 ‘Region’, ‘Theme’, ‘Libraries’ and 'Document Type'.

Search Directories

The Search Directories are lists of Subjects, Authors, People, Sub-collections and Places that occur in Frontier Life. All this information has been captured where possible though it is not necessarily a comprehensive list. We have tried to apply keywords consistently.

To return a list of documents associeted with a keyword/subject, simply select the terms you want (they can be multiple) and click 'Search'.

Search Results

At the side of the search results page, you can select to filter results by 'Documents', 'Image Gallery' or 'Secondary Resources', or refine via 'Date', ‘Theme’, ‘Region’ or 'Document Type'.

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 search results will be displayed with a list of the relevant sections from the original image with additional details of the image number, chapter number and number of hits where relevant. Thumbnails with full text 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.

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 hits are highlighted 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.

Explore

Essays

This section provides the user with a selection of essays written by leading academics.
TIP: The  icon will generate a printable version of the essay.
TIP: The  icon will generate a PDF version.

External Links

This page provides users with a list of websites with important and interesting material for frontier studies, along with a brief overview of each site. Click on the link next to the thumbnail image 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.

Video Interviews

In this section leading academics who have provided essays for the resource discuss the topics they have raised in their writing in a video question-and-answer session.

Museum of Frontier Culture

This feature has been put together in partnership with the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton Virginia. The museum replicates the living conditions of settlers to the Appalachian river valleys from the 1720s to the 1850s. This online feature contains photographs of three of the buildings at the museum, together with contextual information and links to related documents that can be found in the Frontier Life collections.

Further Resources

Image Gallery

Selected visual resources have been grouped together into image galleries, which can be filtered by date, theme, image type, region or library using the drop-down lists.

To view a slideshow of images, select the images you want to use by clicking the tickbox next to each title, then select 'Run Slideshow of Selection' from the 'Image Options' drop-down. Alternatively, you can save the selection for this session or download the selection as a multi-page PDF.

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

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 using the left and right arrows on your keyboard.
Metadata relating to the slideshow material can be searched in isolation via the Image Gallery option on the Advanced Search page.

Map-Chronology

Found by clicking on the ‘Chronology’ tab in the main menu, the Map-Chronology situates events in time and space in order to contextualise the frontier between European, European-American and European-Australasian people and the Indigenous inhabitants of North America, Africa and Australasia. It displays individual events in the foreground and in the information bar on the left of the screen. At the same time, a shaded background on the map displays long-term fluctuations in settlement, contact and political control.

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 to which your library is subscribed. A link to Archive Explorer is available on the footer of all pages and the Advanced Search page.

RefWorks/EndNote

You can export the bibliographic details of each document to RefWorks and EndNote if you have user rights to these systems. These options are available to you on the document's listing or on the Document Details page of each individual item. Just click the RefWorks or EndNote 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'll find OpenURLs on the essay pages, or anywhere we suggest you continue your research using library materials. Click on the reference to send this item to your institution’s link resolver and establish the easiest way to access this 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.