Home › Databases › New Zealand Index › New Zealand Index help

New Zealand Index help

The New Zealand Index is a database collection which currently includes sixteen separate sources of indexed records:

and the full text of:

Searching the New Zealand Index:

A query across of all collections will search more than 4 million records (2013).
To find out more about each of the New Zealand Index collections, click on their names in the list above.

Simple searching
To get started, at the search form, simply type a word or words that you would expect to find in documents of interest to you.
Stemming – the Solr Search Engine searches for word stems by default e.g. tax will retrieve documents containing tax, taxes, taxation but not taxi.
To force an exact match, e.g. “tax” place speech marks around the word. (documents retrieved will contain the word tax.)
Wildcard truncation The query “tax*” will retrieve all words beginning with the string tax, thus documents retrieved would contain tax, taxes, taxation and taxi.
Phrase searching – you may search for a phrase by typing in the words in consecutive order, separated by spaces and surrounded by double quotes. For example: “asian crisis”
Where ‘and’ is part of the phrase, e.g. pulp and paper. If you use a lower case and, it will be treated as part of the phrase and not as AND the operator. (With the use of AND the search engine will assume that you are looking for documents containing both words, but in any order).
People Name Search
Entering the person’s name without quotes will retrieve them in any order e.g. Ross Ritchie. You can be more specific by specifying that the two words must be close to each other, e.g. within 5 words “Ross Ritchie”~5

Sample Search
Formulate your query: – what is it you want to find?

e.g. You have been asked to find out about the Asian financial crisis.

Type in your query: asia AND (crisis OR downturn)
Restrict your search to current records by selecting the appropriate boxes.

Boolean operators:
Using AND OR NOT

Use these connectors to make more specific queries.
For example, asia AND crisis will identify documents containing both these words but in any order.
In contrast, asia OR crisis will return vastly more results because you have broadened the search to documents which contain either word!
Searching for asia NOT crisis will narrow the search to documents containing the word asia but not the word crisis.
(n.b. ensure you use upper case for the operators).

Searching by Year:
Simply edit the Year range boxes at the bottom of the search screen to limit your search to particular date.

Zone or Field Searching:
NZ Index Zones:
Title
Source
Subjects
Year – see searching by Year.
You may restrict your search to any of the zones available by clicking the appropriate check boxes on the search screen e.g. in the first search box put your keywords and click on All for your zone button, then in the second search box you can restrict your search to say, the magazine Unlimited, by putting unlimited in the search box and clicking on Source for your zone button.
Record display:
Records may be displayed by Score (relevance) or Year (earliest or latest).
25 records are displayed 25 at a time.
Records are retrieved by clicking on the title of the document displayed in the results view. The complete index record will display in a new browser tab.