Page by Page Guide
Getting Started
Browsers
My Archive
Register/Log In
Adding Material to My Archive
My Bookshelf
My Lightbox
Documents
Overview and Browsing
View All Documents
Document Details
Download Options, Saving, Rotating and Printing
Viewing the Original Image
Share
Searching
Basic Search
Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology
Boolean Functionality
Advanced Search
Search Results
Viewing Search Results
Research Tools
Case studies
Essays and Video Interviews
Chronology
External Links
Search Directories
AMExplorer
RefWorks/EndNote
OpenURLs
Getting Started
Before beginning to use Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain you may find it helpful to consult the background information contained in the Nature and Scope page found in the Introduction section of this website. Click on the 
icon below the search bar on every page to link to the relevant section of these help pages.
Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain is optimised to use the following browsers: Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer 10 and 11, and the latest releases of Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome.
Click the link above the search bar 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.
'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 home page, submit your login details, and off you go.
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 Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain 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 to My Archive button and it will automatically be stored in your individual account so you can return to it at any time.
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.
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
You can browse the documents in Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain 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 with that theme. Here you can also browse by Document Type and/or Library/Archive in combination with a theme. Once you have chosen your browse criteria (e.g. 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 filter applied. Alternatively you can click the 'View all documents' panel to see everything.
Click 'View all documents' to go to the full documents list, filterable by a variety of categories: Date, Document Type, Theme, and Library/Archive. You can view a document by clicking on the thumbnail or title.
Documents are loaded 200 to a page and can be scrolled through. Navigation between pages with more than 200 documents listed is available at the top of the list. Users can browse previous and next pages, select a page number or a letter from the alphabetical list.
Full text searchable documents are indicated with the following icon: 
Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) searchable documents are indicated with the following icon: 
From this page you can sort the order of each column, and also select the display of the last column to show either 'Theme', 'Document Type' or 'Library/Archive'.
From the documents list, click on a title link and this will take you to the document details page that provides thumbnail images from the document, document-level metadata and the ability to start viewing the original image 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 to return to the document list. Download the full document or a range of pages as a PDF using the PDF drop-down selection boxes.
Where available, some additional 'Issue', 'Chapter' or 'Section' information will also be displayed underneath the metadata. The County, Country, Places, People and Keywords details within the metadata are clickable and will generate a search for the same term across the whole resource.
Download Options, Saving, Rotating and Printing
For the best-quality printout, it is recommended that you download the required image(s) 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 there is a page range provided there are sometimes 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" listed represents an image. 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 bear in mind when downloading entire documents that many of the files will be quite large and can take some time.
Clicking on the thumbnail, chapter, issue or section will generate the image-viewing screen. You can increase or decrease the magnification of the original image by using the 
icons at the top of the image-viewer window. To move around the image you can drag the document by holding down the left mouse button and then moving the mouse to the preferred view.
The icon 
will open the image viewer in full screen.
The icons 
will rotate the image, which will resize to fit screen view.
The icon 
will return the image to its original position.
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 article or selecting a specific page number.
Users can use the plus/minus buttons or their mouse wheel, to zoom in and out. The image can be rotated using the arrow buttons. It can be made full screen by clicking the 'toggle' button, and returned to its original setting by clicking on the 'home' button. Users can also return to the Document Details page, browse to the next/previous image, jump to a particular page, search within the document, add image to My Lightbox, or download the image or article.
Clicking on the 'Thumbnails' tab will display all the thumbnails for the document.
By clicking on the 
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
The search engine searches across all document-level metadata including bibliographic details, full text of printed material and selected additional editorial features. Searches are carried out at document level for all documents and at image level for full text searchable documents.
A basic keyword search box is available on all screens in the header. Type in your search term and either click on 'Go' or press enter. You can also integrate 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 (HTR)
Adam Matthew is delighted to be able to deliver groundbreaking Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) search technology for the correspondence and papers of Poor Law Assistant Commissioners and Inspectors digitised from The National Archives UK in Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain. This delivers document-level full-text search results highlighted in handwritten documents.
HTR searchable documents are indicated with the following icon:
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 list.
Can I see a transcript of the manuscript material? The HTR technology used in Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain does not currently 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 vagrancy OR pauperism will search for all three words together, not vagrancy and pauperism as two terms occurring separately in the same document.
Visit the Handwritten Text Recognition page for more information about how to use this technology to explore the documents in Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain.
Boolean Operators
The keyword search supports the Boolean operators AND, OR and AND NOT between keywords. Using the terms ‘outdoor relief' and 'indoor relief' as examples: to return results in which both ‘outdoor relief' and 'indoor relief' 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 ‘outdoor relief’ or 'indoor relief', add OR between terms.
To return results in which ‘outdoor relief’, but not 'indoor relief' appears, add AND NOT between terms. This will search for ‘outdoor relief' but exclude any pages which also include 'indoor relief'.
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 ("Public Health Act") will only return results in which the words appear next to each other. Please note that if you phrase search, your number of hits displayed will still appear as individual words (e.g. if the phrase "Public Health Act" appears on a page twice, the results will show six 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, a search for “child” might retrieve “children”, “childhood” 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 “workhouse” and “workhouses”, 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 "workhouse rules" 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 "ship" will return ship, ships, shipped, etc. However, it will not return different words that simply begin with ship (e.g. shipbuilding, shipyard). For this, you need to use a wildcard.
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 button.
TIP: Use of these drop-down operators still follows the Boolean rules of precedence. Searches can be filtered by 'Date', 'Theme', 'Document Type' or 'Library/Archive' by choosing an option from the drop-down lists. Searches can also be refined by restricting the search to either the Image Gallery or Secondary Resources.
On the search results page, under 'Filter by' you can select to filter results by 'Documents' or 'Secondary Resources' only, or refine by 'Date', 'Theme', 'Document Type' or 'Library/Archive'. You can export results as an email. When you select 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/page number, chapter number and number of hits where relevant. Thumbnails that contain hits will be displayed with a 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 on the bases of relevance, pages or number of hits.
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.
You can view the relevant image from the full text search results by selecting the link above the original image snippet. You can view the document from the beginning by clicking on the thumbnail image.
Full text and HTR hits are highlighted on the original image. Use the 'prev hit' and 'next hit' buttons above the image to browse other hits within the document. Selecting to view search results will open the relevant document in the relevant collection in a new window.
Research Tools
The Research Tools tab gives you new ways to approach the material in Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain.
This section provides shorter introductory pieces to different thematic areas, with lists of complementary documents from the resource to help springboard research.
This section provides you with a selection of essays written by leading academics. Many of the essays will include hypertext links to the original documents. Clicking on a link will open a new window and if the link relates to a complete document the user will be taken to the Document Details page from where you can browse the images. To return to the essay simply close or minimise the new window.
TIP: The 
icon will generate a printable version of the essay.
TIP: The 
icon will generate a PDF version.
Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain also features a video with Peter Higginbotham. This provides further contextual information for primary source collections in this resource.
The Chronology provides context to Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain. Key events and legislation are listed. Entries are accompanied by related images and documents from the collection. Choose the entries you wish to view by selecting categories from the left-hand filter bar. You can also search via keyword and navigate using the timeline along the top of the page.
By clicking on the External Links thumbnail on the Explore home page, users are provided with a list of websites with important and interesting material relating to the themes found in Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain.
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.
The Search Directories are lists of Keywords, People, Counties and Settlement Houses and Charitable Institutions which occur in Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain. All of this information has been captured where possible, though it is not necessarily a comprehensive list. To return a list of documents associated with a keyword, simply click on the term you are interested in. You can make multiple selections within one directory. Click 'Search' when you are ready, or 'Clear' to remove your selected terms.
AMExplorer 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.
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 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.