An example of the new Search Suggestions feature of the Virtual Vietnam Archive

Today we launched a new feature in the Virtual Vietnam Archive – a Search Suggestions/Thesaurus section on the Search Results page.  This thesaurus contains variant spellings, common misspellings, acronyms, abbreviations, and related terms for many of the common words in the Virtual Archive.  These terms are organized into groups of closely related terms.  To view a complete list of the terms in the thesaurus, go to the Advanced Search page and click “Thesaurus Terms” at the bottom of the right column.  Please note that this is not a listing of all of the searchable terms in the Virtual Archive (there are over 20 million indexed terms in the database).  It is solely intended as a search aid, and is being regularly updated.

The Search Suggestions section will become available when any keyword term in a search matches a term in the Thesaurus.  It is matching individual words, not phrases, so searching for “Agent Orange” will display any thesaurus term set that has either “Agent” or “Orange” in it, though the set matching both terms will be listed first.  When search suggestions are available, on the Search Results page a red box will appear with the text “Search Suggestions Available – Click to Show.”  Clicking this box will open the search suggestions section.  You can hide the suggestion by clicking the “Hide” link inside the suggestions section.

Each of the search suggestion terms appears as a clickable link.  Clicking a term will generate a new set of (up to 500) search results matching that term.  Please remember that this is not a search within the original search results but is rather a completely new search.

We hope that these suggestions will be useful to researchers and people browsing the Virtual Archive holdings.  If you have any questions or problems with this feature, or any other aspects of the Virtual Archive, or if you have suggestions for other terms for the Thesaurus, please feel free to contact us at any time at vietnamarchive@ttu.edu.