Ohioline Web Searching

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.

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.

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.