Discovery is an eyeopener!
 

Luddite that I am, I am hating getting to grips with TNA's latest version of the Catalogue. All the fancy fonts do my eyes in. But I foolishly volunteered to do a talk before I realised the implications. So now I am trying to work out how to do searches.

As an example, I tried "Smith" under TNA ref J77, which I know is divorces.

Sure enough, I succeeded in getting 2452 hits.

It invited me to refine my search.

"Weapons" took my eye. You don't usually get the violence in the index.

When I looked, it was Mr William CANNON Smith:D

Phoenix, I don't like the Discovery search. I have sent them an e-mail to that effect, but have yet to receive a reply.

You used to be able to search for wills by location - so could get all the wills for a village. That helped me a lot. Also, I used to use the surname field a lot - it helps with a surname like Lamb. If you put in "Lamb" to a general search you get all sorts of stupid results!

Elizabeth, I think the search on this page (scroll down a bit) will still work for searching for all the wills in a village:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/wills.htm

I gather that you wouldn't be the only person to dislike the new system, Elizabeth, and not just as an outside user.

I agree that losing a tag that showed whether something was a name or a place is a definite retrograde step.
And with abbreviations such as Camb. you cannot search for Cambridge and hope to get a hit.

That is taking me straight back to Discovery, Kite. Documents Online may still be around (just) but they are planning to switch it off very soon.

I shall be attending Catalogue Day in November. The programme isn't finalised, but I notice that PR on Discovery is billed top of the list.

I thought Documents Online was already off?

Thanks, Kate, that worked for me. I hope I just remember where it is!

I also have confusion between place names and surnames - I have quite a few surnames that are also place names and it is most infuriating to get hits for places when you are searching for people.

I hope they listen to the comments and act on them.

Oh, I just realised that the will search I linked to does also bring back people with the same name as the village. :(

So it does - I searched for Scotton, a village in Lincs. where I have ancestors and the first hit was for a man with the name of Scotton.

Discovery doesn't seem to be working properly - maybe it doesn't include all records yet?

I tried searching for an unusual name, Adrian Gregory (in inverted commas). Discovery gave me one hit, but the TNA quick search, which I've always found excellent, gave me two entirely different hits, one of which related to the person I was looking for.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/s...px?&queryText=

Actually, the Discovery results page suggests that ther results are limited to 1900-1924, and to labour, seamen and shipping records, although I clicked on All Collections.

The Discovery FAQs are here, and the more I read them, the worse the new system looks.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a...overy-faqs.htm

For example, it says:

What doesn't Discovery do that the old Catalogue did?

It doesn't have a 'go to reference' feature. To go to a reference in Discovery, enter it in the search box and it will run a search. If the reference contains items these will be returned in the list of results.

Well, I tried that with the reference that came up on the old search for Adrian Gregory, but it told me it was an invalid reference.
As it happens, it relates to a record held by Leics. record office.
Surely Discovery isn't excluding everything not physically held at Kew (ie. the stuff that used to be on the old A2A site)?

Why am I seeing different results when searching digitised documents to when I used DocumentsOnline?

We've changed the quick search function that was available in DocumentsOnline, allowing users to search a particular collection (such as wills and medal cards). Some users have reported that it's not giving the same results as the DocumentsOnline search. Broadly speaking, this is because Discovery searches keywords rather than names. We are currently exploring ways to make the quick search function more useful; in the meantime, our advanced search function allows users to search for specific words by record series.

That sounds not only confusing, but also far less useful than the old searches.

I certainly hope I've missed something, and it's not as bad as it sounds.