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• What is Scotland’s Culture?
  Scotland’s culture is a service that allows users to find resources that are about Scottish Culture. It provides access to electronic resources (websites), print resources (books, manuscripts, etc.) and collections of resources, which can be either electronic or print.
  
  
  
• What websites are included in Scotland’s Culture?
  In collecting cultural websites Scotland’s Culture attempts to take a broad definition of Scottish culture. The service includes links to websites that represent traditional Scottish Culture, as well as sites that represent the cutting edge of Scotland’s culture today. The service attempts to reflect the cultural diversity that exists in Scotland.
  
  
  
• What websites are not included in Scotland’s Culture?
  Websites that are not regarded as cultural are not included in Scotland’s Culture. The service assesses websites before including them in the service and tries to ensure that they are of reasonable quality. Ultimately, however Scotland’s Culture is not responsible for the content of any websites linked to from this site and cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information on the sites.
  
  Scotland’s Culture is bound by the laws of the UK and will not include websites that break UK law. Some websites in Scotland’s Culture may contain content that some people may find offensive. In such cases a warning is recorded in the notes below the URL.
  
  
  
• What can I search in Scotland’s Culture?
  Scotland’s Culture allows you to search several different services for resources. The quick, basic and advanced search, cover the main Scotland’s Culture service. This is comprised of web resources selected by the Scotland’s Culture team.
  
  If you select the printed sources option from the search menu you are taken to CAIRNS (Co-operative Retrieval Network) which is a service that enables you to search the content of Scottish libraries. The CAIRNS search is principally for print items located in Scottish Libraries, but also includes a search of the main Scotland’s Culture database of websites. If you select the “Advanced” option you can pick which libraries to search.
  
  
  
• How do I search Scotland’s Culture?
  Each page within Scotland’s Culture contains a help page, that will provide you with tips on how to search the service. There are several different searches available:

  Simple search – a search of websites and electronic resources that have been collected by the Scotland’s Culture team. This search is a “General Keyword” search.
  
  This means that it will search the:

  • Titles
  • Authors
  • Subjects
  • Descriptions of websites
  This is a broad search and most likely to return hits. If you are getting too many results from the simple search you may want to use the advanced search to create more specific searches.
  
  Basic search – a search of websites and electronic resources that provides several search options. The default option is “General Keyword”, which will give you the same results as the simple search. You can also choose search options from the drop down menu to narrow your search.
  
  The available options are:
  
• Title Keyword
• Author Keyword
• Subject Keyword
• Title Alphabetically
• Author Alphabetically
• Subject Alphabetically.

There are various reasons why you may want to select a particular search option rather than use General Keyword. For example, if you were looking for websites about Robert Louis Stevenson and you did not want to find sites that included texts written by him, you could search for “Robert Louis Stevenson” as a subject. Conversely, if you wanted sites that had pieces of work written by Stevenson you could search his name as an author search.

If you are unsure of how to spell a person's name you may want to use an alphabetical search to help you find them in the database. Names are stored in Scotland’s Culture surname first. So if you wanted to do an “Author Alphabetically” search for Robert Louis Steven you would have to enter “Stevenson” first. In fact you do not need to enter the whole name, typing “Ste” will take you to an alphabetical list beginning with all names that started with the letters “Ste”.

• Advanced search – The advanced search provides a range of features that enable you to create detailed searches.
  
  It provides four keyword searches:
  
  • General
  • Title
  • Name
  • Subject

  
  You can use these options in the same way as the basic search, but you can also use more than one search option at a time. For example, you could search for a subject keyword of “brass bands” and a subject keyword of “Glasgow”. This would return only the brass bands that are in Glasgow.
  
  You can combine search terms for different search options and apply Boolean operators to allow you to combine search terms in different ways:

AND

e.g. Subject keyword - Brass bands AND Barrhead
= find sites with a subject called Brass bands and with a subject of Barrhead.

Returns sites that feature Brass bands from Barrhead

OR

e.g. Subject keyword – Brass bands OR Barrhead
=find sites with a subject called Brass bands or a subject called Barrhead

Returns sites that feature brass bands or sites that are about Barrhead (note: the sites don’t have to be about brass bands)

NOT

e.g. Subject keyword – Brass bands NOT Barrhead
= find sites with a subject called brass bands but not sites with a subject called Barrhead

Returns brass bands websites from anywhere except Barrhead.

XOR

e.g. Subject keyword – Brass bands XOR Barrhead
= find sites that have either Brass bands or Barrhead in the subject, but not those that have both Brass bands and Barrhead

Returns websites about brass bands that are not in Barrhead and websites about Glasgow that don’t feature brass bands.

Browse – Browse provides access to two different search options.

Guides – These are guides to different aspects of Scottish Culture. Some have been written by the Scotland’s Culture team, while others are prepared by organisations or professionals that have expertise in a particular area of Scottish Culture. They describe a topic and provide links to significant websites. Some of the guides provide links that search Scotland’s Culture for lists of resources relevant to that topic.

Directory – The directory provides a way of navigating through the different subjects covered by Scotland’s Culture. All resources that are in the database are given subject terms that describe their content and the directory allows you to navigate these terms from broad subject areas, down to more specific aspects of a topic.

Within the directory there are three different types of search that you can carry out.

• The blue Go button takes you to web resources within the Scotland’s Culture service.
• The pink search button takes you to the SCONE (Scottish Collections Network) service and collections in Scottish libraries and museums.
• The grey button carries out a CAIRNS search, showing print items from Scotland’s libraries.

  
  
  In addition to navigating by subject, the directory also allows you to browse by place. You can click on a region on the map of Scotland and it will carry out a search of the service for resources that are about that area.

  
  Printed sources
  Printed sources search is one of Scotland's Culture's main searching tools. The printed sources search is powered by CAIRNS. Printed sources search allows you to search by subject over a number of printed sources held in various public and university libraries and other online services. Printed sources search is a handy tool for determining what the holdings are for libraries and information services in Scotland and whether the item is available.

  To perform a printed sources search:

• Click the printed sources search tab.
• Enter the search term that you want to use in the search box
• Click on the button to the right hand side of the search box.
  
  The results page has a list of the services searched and a number of items found in each service. The items found depend on whether your search found any resources available within each of the services searched.
  
  To view any of the items within the service, click on the name of the item or the number of items found. Click on the title of the result to go to the items page. The item page has useful information such as where the item is held and if available. Please be aware that each of the services searched have their own policies for lending material and it is advised contact be made to check these issues.
  
  
• Why can’t I find what I’m looking for?
  If you are not getting the results you expected when you search, you should first check that you have spelt your search term correctly. If you are still not getting results you should check that you are using an appropriate search option. For example, the “Title keyword” option will only search titles and will not include the names of people who may have created the resource.
  
  It may be useful to try using a “General Keyword” search as this searches all search options at once. If you are still not getting results, you should try an alternate search term or try to make your search less specific.
  
  If you find that the website that you were interested in is not in Scotland’s Culture you can forward the URL to us and we will assess whether to add it.
  
  
• Who runs Scotland’s Culture?
  The service is funded by the Scottish Executive and is maintained by the Scottish Library & Information Council (SLIC).
  
  In addition, Scotland’s Culture works with other cultural institutions and helps to make these institutions services and information available to a wider public.
  
  
• A pilot project?
  Scotland’s Culture is a pilot project. This means that although the service is available for the public to use the service is still being developed. As the service is in its infancy, not all subject areas are covered and the services offered by Scotland’s Culture may change and develop over time.