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Language:DeutschEnglishFrançaisItaliano Last updated: 2026-08-18

Full-text search

The full-text search searches all relevant fields of the archival records at once: titles, reference codes, text fields, linked actors, places and keywords — and also the text recognised by OCR from PDFs and images.

What is searched

For each archival object, the following are combined for the search:

  • Titles of the object and of all superordinate units (fonds → series → file → document)
  • Reference codes (current and former) as well as the internal ID
  • Designations of the level of description, the object type and the location
  • Datings
  • Linked keywords in all available language variants
  • Linked places
  • Linked actors (only those publicly visible)
  • Text fields that are visible in the external form
  • OCR text from media (PDFs, images)

Extended view for internal editors

For logged-in users from the user_intern role upwards, the following are searched in addition:

  • private actors
  • all text fields (including those visible internally only)
  • objects marked as private

Search behaviour

Word beginnings are recognised automatically

Wildcards (*) are not necessary — the search automatically finds all words that begin with the search term entered.

Search Finds
alkohol «Alkohol», «Alkoholverbot», «alkoholisch»
müller «Müller», «Müller-Weber», «Müllers»

But not in the middle of a word

kohol does not find «Alkohol». The search only takes effect at the beginning of a word.

Several words are combined with AND

Search Finds
alkohol verbot Records in which both terms occur — they may be any distance apart

Quotation marks for exact phrases

Search Finds
"rudolf leder" Only records in which this sequence of words occurs exactly like this
#rudolf leder# Identical — # is an alternative notation for "

With a phrase, word beginnings are not searched automatically — the phrase has to occur exactly.

Very short words are ignored in phrases too

Words of fewer than 3 characters and some English stop words (the, for, and) drop out of the comparison even within quotation marks. A phrase such as "AG Reinach" therefore effectively matches only «Reinach».

Terms with a hyphen

Terms with a hyphen (e.g. Arp-Hagenbach) are automatically treated like a phrase: the search looks for both parts directly next to each other.

What does not work

  • Terms of fewer than 3 characters are ignored (ag, zb).
  • Very frequent short words such as «und», «der», «die» are excluded from the database's search index (so-called stop words).
  • Searching in the middle of a word is not possible (see above).

The full-text search searches archival objects. The weighted search is a different function and concerns the list views of actors, places and keywords — there, hits are sorted by relevance.