The Making of Modern Law Database is a digital online archive providing a collection of approximately 22,000 legal treatises published in the United States and Great Britain between 1800 and 1926.
- The Basic Search is the default search on the homepage.
- Basic search defaults to a full text search of database materials. Or you can choose from the drop-down menu to search in one of several ways:
- Full Text : to search the entire text of the document plus the author, title, and section headings.
- Keyword : to search the author, title, and chapter/section heading fields.
- Author : to search only the author field.
- Title : to search only the title field.
- Subject : search only the subject heading fields. This search only works when you know the specific subject heading (Library of Congress and Harvard Classification are used).
- You can use truncation or "wildcard" characters to broaden a search
- * represents any number of characters;
- ! represents 1 or 0 characters; and
- ? represents exactly one character
- You can use Boolean connectors AND, OR, NOT, W (within), N (next to) and parenthesis (to search for an exact phrase, enclose it in parenthesis) to refine the search.
- The database will not search for certain short words like “a”, “the” or “and”. You may search for those words as part of a phrase if you enclose the phrase in parenthesis.
- Some search limiters are available through a basic search. These include whether materials are UK or US; publication date; and list of 99 topics to search within.
- Advanced Search allows you to combine a variety of search criteria, including: keyword, subject, author, title, full text, person as subject, geographic subject, front matter (tables of contents, prefaces, forewords, and other preliminary material), main text (excludes preliminary material and indexes), indexes, publisher, place of publication.
- You can limit your search with: year of publication, body of law (i.e., British or American), Topic (select from list of 99 topics), language, number of pages, illustrated works, Gale Document number (assigned by database manager), MARC record number.
- Fuzzy Search – Fuzzy search settings locate a word or words despite imperfect matches in spelling between the searched term and document content (this can be helpful for old or British documents).
- E.g., a low fuzzy search for “harbor” will return results with both “harbor” and “harbour.”
- E.g., a high fuzzy search for “harbor” will return results with “harbor,” “harbour,” “Harper,” and “Harben.”
- Note: you cannot use truncation or wildcard characters in combination with a fuzzy search.
You may browse materials by viewing an alphabetical list of authors or an alphabetical list of titles. Fifty authors or titles appear on the screen at a time, and they are entered exactly as they appear on the document. This means that authors who use more than one name will be listed under each variation of their name. For example the some works of France Ford Coppella would be listed under “Coppella, Frances” while other of his works would be listed under the heading “ Coppella, Frances Ford.” To find all of his work you would have to look at both of his author listings.
Search within a retrieved document
“Search This Work” allows you to conduct a full text search for a term or phrase within the document you are viewing.
Search history
The Search History feature saves and displays a list of the searches you have conducted within a session. To re-conduct a search from the list, select the search term and click the “view” button in the Search History box. Your search results will be re-displayed.
Printing and e-mailing in PDF Format (Recommended)
You may print or e-mail the current page image in PDF format, or a range of page images in PDF format. To do so, choose the “Print/View PDF” icon on the left side of the screen, and then follow the prompts. Note that the program will only allow you to download 50 pages at a time. In order to download larger documents you must break it down into 50 page files.
Printing and e-mailing Marked Lists, Citations, Table of Contents, and Lists of Illustrations
- Marked lists, Citations, Table of Contents, and List of Illustrations can be reformatted for printing. The pages are reformatted in an html format. You may then print using your browser's print option.
- Marked lists, Citations, Table of Contents, and List of Illustrations can be reformatted for e-mail. Choose the e-mail option from any of these pages. An options form offers you a choice of reformatting the page in an html or plain text format, and provides a text box in which you type an e-mail address.
Above information obtained from Help and Search Tips sections on Making of Modern Law Web Site. For more information, please review those sections of the database.