Ohioline CD-ROM Searching

Ohioline-CD can be used in a variety of ways. One common need is searching for information. This page describes several of the different ways to search Ohioline.

These include:

• Browsing
• Find
• Index
• Keywords
• IViewPro
• Server
• Hard Drive

Browsing

This is probably what you are doing now... You got to this page by selecting a hypertext link. Browsing is like walking around the web: click on a link, look at the information, select another link and so on. Browing can be valuable to discover what exists in a web, as well as going to documents that exist in a known information structure. Browsing is not efficient at finding every instance of a specific term.

Ohioline content is arranged in menu forms through topic pages. These are the main buttons on the Fact Sheets & Bulletins page: Food, Home, Youth, Family, Community, Yard & Garden, Farm, Environment, and Business.

Each of topics contains a list of relevant titles. Regular users of Ohioline will easily learn this structure and use it like a trip to the library where similar content is grouped together.

Find

Nearly all browsing software has the ability to search the current page through find. This can be accessed through a button or menu item. This search is simple but useful. Topic pages can be used fairly effectively with find to locate known titles.

Click on the button or menu item, then type the text to find. Keep in mind that this search is only happening in the document that is on the screen. Find can work with whole words or fragments.

If successful, find will stop on the first occurance of the search text, then the next, etc.

Index

A majority of the Ohioline content is organized like the hardcopy Extension and Research publications. There is a fair number of Bulletins and Fact Sheet Series in Ohioline. These documents are all referenced by their publication number.

Both Ohioline-Web and Ohioline-CD are organized following this scheme. For example: each Extension bulletin is stored in its' own folder/subdirectory; each factsheet series is stored in its' own folder/subdirectory. The Agronomy Guide is Bulletin 472, it is stored in the b472 folder. The Senior Series of factsheets is stored in the ss-fact folder.

Each folder has an index file that lists the components of the folder. Going to the index file of the Senior Series folder will provide a list of all the available titles.

Users of Ohioline that are familiar with the organization of our Research and Extension Publications may find direct jumps within the folders to be of use.

Keywords

Ohioline has over 600 keywords. Keywords are terms of common use with Ohioline content. Each keyword has a list of associated document titles. The keywords can be accessed through Ohioline Search from the CD-ROM as well as online.

Keywords are arranged alphabetically. Select the first letter of the keyword, then the keyword itself. Note that while 600+ is quite a few keywods, even this is not comprehensive.

IViewPro

Ohioline-CD is distributed with an offline browser called IViewPro. IviewPro works like other browsers; you view pages and link from page to page. IViewPro is designed to work with information, such as CD-ROM and hard drive, that is local to a computer rather than on the Internet.

IViewPro also has a built in local disk search capability. This means you can use IViewPro to search every file on a CD-ROM or your hard drive for specific text.

To use IViewPro's search, you must be running the software. IViewPro can be run directly from the Ohioline-CD, or installed on your hard drive. Ohioline-CD has versions of IViewPro for use in Windows 3.x (16 bit) and Windows95 (32 bit). IViewPro is not available as a Macintosh program.

The simplest way to get IViewPro running is to load from Ohioline-CD. Select run from the Windows Menu and browse to your CD-ROM drive. Then select either IVP16 (16 bit - Win3) or IVP32 (32 bit - Win95). Then select and run the IVIEWPRO.EXE file.

With IViewPro running, Select File Find from the File Menu and provide the information on Search String (the text you want to find), File type, Look in (drive & directory), etc. You can select the entire disk or a specific directory/folder. If you wanted to search only the Home, Yard & Garden Fact Sheets, you could limit the search to only R:\OHIOLINE\HYG-FACT, where R is the drive designation for your CD-ROM.

Be sure to click on Match File Name and Content. This provides a search of the files.

Click on Search to begin. IViewPro will then search the target files.

When complete, IViewPro provides a list of files that contain the search text. Click on the titles from the list to view.

While the IViewPro search is not as fast as an indexed search, the performance is acceptable with most of the systems tested.

Server

Ohioline exists as a Web Site. The server for Ohioline-Web provides a complete word search.

To search, connect with the server at http://ohioline.ag.ohio-state.edu/lines/search.html and enter the word or words you are trying to connect with. The search engine will return a list of documents that contain the word or words. This list will be sorted by a calculated index value. Review the titles and select and appropriate.

Hard Drive

New PCs consistently expand the scale of system resources. Many new systems arrive with hard drives having the capacity to easily "hold" the contents of Ohioline-CD.

Sophisticated users that require additional search capability should consider copying the needed Ohioline-CD components to their hard drive. They can then use any of the available indexing/search tools that exist from the Internet or commercial sources.

Ohioline is approximately 500 Mb in size. Of this, over 50 Mb is digital video that may not be needed. Further, Ohioline is organized by content. If a specific facsheet series or bulletin is all that is needed, those files can be copied by folder or subdirectory and used directly from the hard drive.