Help File

 

The program allows you to perform a literature search on (currently) the following journals:

The Journal of the Oughtred Society (All volumes to Vol 32 No. 2 2023)

The Slide Rule Gazette (All volumes to Issue 23 Autumn 2023)

Skid Stick (All volumes to No. 76 March 2024)

International Meeting of Slide Rule Collectors (With thanks to the UKSRC - All volumes to the 25th Meeting September 2019)
There was no Volume 10 published - Volume 10 has been published in the form of the ARISTO book by Klaus Kuhn and Karl Kleine.

From Vols 12, 15, and 19 only the English articles are available.



Further, the indexes to all the above publications may be viewed.


You may search using any one or more of four fields,
where the fields have the following significance:

Author:	  The author of the article.  References to all articles authored or co-authored
          by the given author are returned.

Title:	  The title of the article. References to all articles with the given title are
          returned.

Keyword:  Keywords which I have associated with the article unless the author has provided
          them (currently no author has chosen to do so!).
          References to all articles associated with the given keyword are returned.

Citation: Names of (usually) slide rule collectors and/or dealers appearing in the article.
          References to all articles with the specified name are returned.  Surnames only
	  should be used in this field; otnes will succeed, bob otnes will fail.

Year:	 A specific year may be given to restrict the search.


Searches are performed on the exact phrase (but see below) given in each field. However, it is
not necessary to know the exact contents of any field that you are searching for. Thus fuller 
appearing in the title field will return references to all articles with fuller in the title.

IN ALL CASES the case (upper or lower) of the search string in all fields is ignored.

IN GENERAL IT IS FAR BETTER TO PROVIDE TOO LITTLE INFORMATION THAN TOO MUCH.  Thus fuller calculators
in the title field will return no matches; fuller will result in more success.

The five fields are 'ANDED' together.  Thus a search with otnes in the Author field and log
in the Title field will return references to articles authored by otnes and containing log
in the title (such as log-log, logarithm, catalog etc.)

It would be rare therefore to use more than two fields simultaneously.

For more advanced users, a period, ".", may be used to match any character.  Thus a string log.log
in the title field will match all titles containing log-log, log log etc.

It follows that a "." by itself in the Author field will return a list of ALL articles available.

The pipe, "|", may be used as OR.  Thus wyman|aldinger in the author field will match all articles 
authored by Wyman or Aldinger.

Any number of "." and "|" may be used in any field in any combination.

I have associated zero or more keywords (no limit but the current maximum is about thirty) with all
articles. These are words which may (usually the case), or may not, actually appear in the article but 
anyone interested in that word might well be interested in that article.

Keywords may also be slide rule names, e.g. columbus or may be slide rule numbers e.g. 4090.
Note, no suffix and no slide rule maker's name. Thus K&E 4090-3 or 4090-3 will not be successful.

Searches for Keuffel and Esser should use "keuffel", not "keuffel and esser", "k & e" etc.

Articles with no stated Author have been attributed to "The Editors".

English/American input has been assumed throughout. Thus umlauts, graves, circumflexes etc., are not supported
and should not be used.

If you wish, you may observe the first paragraph of all matching articles by using the checkbox, 
Display First Paragraph. 

As mentioned above, I have associated keywords with all articles.  The keywords that I have used may be
observed by using the checkbox "Display/Change" keywords.  Further, anyone may add further keywords to
any article by clicking the appropriate link.

By default all articles are searched.  The search may be restricted to specific publications by using the
radio button to select "JOS Only", "Gazette Only", etc.

The order in which the successfully matched articles are displayed may be controlled with the "Display Order"
radio button. Chronological order is with ascending date article.

The indexes of all the publications may be viewed by selecting the relevant radio button.  In this case
the "Author", "Title", "Keyword", and "Citation" fields are ignored.

Articles found by successful searches are all "clickable" so that they may be viewed in full.

It may be found convenient to set the magnification of the displayed articles to other than 
the default value.  For instance under Internet Explorer 7 and a screen resolution of 1024 x 768,
I find a magnification of approximately 80% to be convenient.




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