A New Coflein Search Facility
Posted: 10 Jun 2013 01:01 AM PDT

A new dimension to the Royal Commission’s web access system?Coflein? is due to be launched on 11 June. Hitherto, public searchers have only been able to search our database of sites and monuments and find those archive records held by the National Monuments Record of Wales which relate specifically to the sites returned by a search. From 11 June, users will also be able to search the National Monuments Record of Wales’ archive catalogue directly. This will allow the public to explore our collections in more depth and access references to records that are not necessarily related to particular sites.

Users will be able to search for records produced by specific individuals, for instance a known archaeologist or historian, or by various organisations. Searches can also be conducted by date, medium of record, through free-text description, or combinations of all of these terms. In addition, researchers can go straight to named collections and explore them by browsing, or by using the search parameters outlined above. Results will display records in their catalogue hierarchy (e.g. at collection, group or item levels) allowing users to understand the context of the records within their parent collections, and see how the various records relate to each other.

New functionality will also allow search returns to be refined by further criteria, e.g. by selecting records only from particular collections or by limiting searches to include only those records which have online digital items. In addition, users will be able to specify what level of catalogue records they wish to view, whether collection, group or item. This ability to refine search returns by further selected criteria will be applied to the existing site search facilities in the coming weeks.

Coflein can be found here: http://www.coflein.gov.uk