Here's a quick overview of how to search.

1. In the Search box below “Enter Search Term”, type one or more words that describe what you're looking for, such as housing resettlement, and choose the appropriate button (“All Words”, “Any Word”, “Exact Phrase”).
   
   To improve the results of your search, please enter the dates and select the media type required by clicking the appropriate box.
   
   

   Search Type	Example	Finds records with
   All Words	Japanese Occupation	both japanese and occupation within each record, although not necessarily next to each other
   Any Word	Japanese Occupation	japanese or occupation
   Exact Phrase	Japanese Occupation	japanese next to the word occupation
   Thesaurus	pollution	pollution and also other synonyms to pollution like contamination
   Date	From 1961 to 1962	the searched words that also fall within the specified dates

   
   
2. Choose what you want to search from the various collections of archival materials. The list of media types displayed indicates the kind of archival material you will be retrieving. You can also decide to search on all the archival collections by checking the All of the above box.
   
   
   
3. Click on the Search button to begin your search. The same search page appears in your Web browser but now, it shows the number of hits that your search has produced for each of the archival collection that was chosen.
   
   
4. View the search results by clicking on any archival collection that is hyperlinked - this indicates that this collection has records that meet your search criteria. When you click on the hyperlink, a new page appears in your Web browser listing the first page of search results for that particular collection. Click on any of the displayed records to view more detailed information.

Viewing search results

After you have keyed in your keywords and started your search, the search page appears with the number of hits produced. From here, you can view the search results for each selected archival collection. The search results page for each archival collection is quite similar and contains the following three main areas:

The Information area at the top of the page indicates the number of records that have been retrieved from the archival collection selected as well as the search term(s) used.

The Navigation area facilitates easy navigation across the pages of the search results.

The Search Results area lists the first ten records that match your search. Depending on the archival collection selected, each result usually contains at least 3 columns - a title or description and dates. Your search keywords appear in a highlighted style so they're easy to spot in the results. To view one of the results, click its title or description. To view a particular page, click on the required page number.

Here's an example of a search:

1. Type housing resettlement in the search box.
2. Select the Exact Phrase button and key in the years 1975 to 1976
3. Check the Photographs and Government Files archival collections.
4. Click the Search button or press the Enter key.
5. The search page displays the number of hits that has been produced for the two selected collections.
6. Click on the hyperlinked archival collection to view the search results
7. Click on a record in the search results page to view the particular record.