--- title: Search and Browse description: How visitors search an archive, browse collections, use filters, and understand item visibility. section: basics order: 2 updated: 2026-06-15 verified: 2026-07-06 related: [basics/downloading-and-citing] features: [] --- # Search and Browse You'll learn how to find items in a Preservated archive and why some items may not appear. Search and browsing work together. Search is best when you know what you want. Browsing is best when you want to explore a collection. ## Search by words or names Try names, places, topics, dates, object identifiers, or visible text you expect to appear in a document or transcript. Search may match: - Item titles and descriptions. - People, creators, subjects, and places. - Collection names. - OCR from scanned documents or images. - Transcript text from recordings. - Extracted text from born-digital documents. If your first search is too narrow, try fewer words. If it is too broad, add a place, decade, person, or format. ## Browse collections Collections are groups created by the institution. They may represent exhibits, donors, neighborhoods, schools, industries, projects, or archival series. Browsing a collection can show relationships that search misses. For example, one photograph may have a vague title but still appear in a collection about a specific community event. ## Containers and their contents Some records hold other records — a survey of a building with its many photographs and drawings, an album of prints, or an archival series. These appear in results as **containers**, marked with a **Contains N items** badge. Open one to see its contents grouped by kind, and follow the **Part of** links on an item to move back up to the container it belongs to. If you would rather not see grouped records, look for the **Containers only** and **Hide items inside containers** toggles on the browse page. ## Use filters Filters narrow a result set. Depending on the archive, you may see filters for collection, item type, date, subject, place, person, or format. Date filters may include approximate dates. An item dated "circa 1920" might appear near nearby years because historical dates are often uncertain. ## Sort results A **Sort** control on the browse and collection pages changes the order of results: - **Featured** — items the institution has highlighted as most significant or visually compelling, shown first. - **Recently updated** — items changed most recently. This is the default. - **Recently added** — newest items first. - **Title (A–Z)** — alphabetical by title. Sorting changes only the order, never which items you can see. In **Featured** order, items the institution has not yet ranked appear after the ranked ones. ## Open an item Select an item to see its full page. The item page usually gives you the most context: viewer, title, description, date, rights, related collections, and download or citation actions. For audio, video, and documents, search results may take you to a timestamp or page when the match came from a transcript or OCR layer. ## Why an item might be missing Not every item in an institution's archive is necessarily public. Some material may be members-only, staff-only, newly imported, under review, restricted for rights reasons, or not digitized yet. Search only returns items you are allowed to see.