• You can use upper or lower case as the searches are not case-sensitive.
• You can truncate or stem search terms to cover variant forms of the words. Thus "brew*" will find records containing the words brewers and breweries and brewing.
• You can search for phrases by placing terms in inverted commas, for example ""Westward Ho!"". This can be helpful if you remember the title of a book, but it must be completely accurate.
• Short words (such as: and, or, not, in, the, a, an, to) can confuse the search engine. These are best omitted or included in a phrase in inverted commas e.g. ""Devon in figures""

• You can enter terms into more than one box. This will normally reduce the number of records found (or hits). Thus "Exeter" in the place box and "church*" in the keyword box will only find records relating to Exeter where the word church or churches also appears anywhere in the record.
• You can widen your search by putting two or more terms in a box separated by "or". Thus "Aylesbeare or Bradninch" in the place box will find records for both places.

• You can exclude unwanted terms by placing "not" before any term to be excluded. Thus "Clovelly not Bratton" in a place search will find works on Clovelly but exclude those on Bratton Clovelly.

Title: E.g. History / Kingsbridge / "Complete works"
This searches the title and subtitle fields of the records for title words or phrases.

Series: This searches the series field for works which form part of a series.

Place: This searches the place field for localities which form the main coverage of the work, normally down to parish level. Smaller localities can also be searched for in the name or keyword fields.

Name: This searches the name field for proper names that form the main coverage of the work, for example individuals, families, organizations, houses, streets, ships, companies.

The pages for individual records were originally generated from an older d-Base database. There have been transferred to an interactive content management system supplied by System Simulation. The following table of metadata elements shows the fields that are being used in this database. Most fields are text fields of variable length and where appropriate they can be repeated within a record: