Laserfiche Weblink Records Search Getting Started

Transcription

1 Laserfiche Weblink Records: Consists of selected public records for the City of Aspen and Pitkin County There are three basic ways to find information using LaserFiche 1. Via a pre-defined Online Search for the City of Aspen for Pitkin County 2. Browse through the folders until you find the document you need. - This is much like you would look through a file cabinet for a hard copy file or browse through a PC or network drive to find a file

2 3. Repository Search - By default, this search will search through the entire Laserfiche City and County Records database either the ENTIRE Laserfiche repository (some 100,000+ documents) or more efficiently, if you know what you are interested in, browse to a folder first, and then pick Current Folder from the drop down to narrow your search. - This search by default searches Text (words that have been indexed in the documents via OCR optical character recognition) Entry Names the actual name of the document Fields these are key pieces of information that have been entered to index important items about a document a. Text Search Click on the Search link and click on the down arrow to Customize Search and pick Text This type of search will search for words or phrases found in the body of a document. Note: In order for the Text search to work, a document must have been through a process called OCR (optical character recognition). Not all documents in LaserFiche have been OCR ed this is particularly true of documents that are handwritten or are of poor quality

3 b. Template or index search Example: Click on the red X to close the text search Click on the Customize Search drop down and pick Field Then, choose the Template: Pitkin BOCC In the example below, search for all documents cross referenced to the airport. This example shows this with the wild card character of * on either end

4 Once you get your results, you can click on Show more information and you will see some thumbnails from the document, and below that the index fields for this document. This can help you determine if it is the document you are interested in. Additional Wild Card characters: * (Asterisk) Represents zero or more missing characters. For example, govern*s would find governors, governments, and governs.? (Question Mark) Represents any single character. For example, gr?y would find gray, grey, but not gravy. [] (Brackets) Brackets are also used as a wildcard for any single character. A limited set of replacement characters can be specified within the brackets. For example, gr[ae]y would find gray and grey but no others. - (Dash) This operator indicated a range of characters. For example, b[a-i]t would find the words batter, better and bitter, but not butter. Wildcards can be combined. For example, br[a-o]ke* would find all of the following words: brake, braked, broke, broker, and broken

5 4. Combine the above: What if I want to look for a document only in Pitkin County / County Commissioners? Browse to that folder and highlight as below. Click on the Search and choose Within Folder it defaults to the folder you had open in the browse window. You can add whatever other criteria you wish a text search or a template search or both. Be careful how many criteria you combine however

6 What do the search results mean? Here is a search for Obermeyer within 10 words of place. The results show there are 140 documents found that meet this criteria. The results are sorted by the # of hits. The name of the document name is listed (coa.lu.su.625 E Main St ), the template name (Aspen Landuse), as well as the page count and path to the document. Click on Show more information to view thumbnails and index information for this document. You can click on the document name and see the entire document or Click on one of the page numbers and it will take you directly to that page with the search criteria highlighted on that page

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8 Most useful search options and what they mean: 1. Text search will do a search for text by phrase or phrases combined with and / or / not, plus within a certain number of characters, sentences or paragraphs. 2. Document/folder name if you know the name or part of the name of a document (Can use wild cards so *boa* would find all file names with boa in it. Pitkin County building files typically have the parcel ID in the name, so if you know the parcel ID and want to find all the files for that parcel, use the document name search with *parcel ID number* 3. Template this uses the template or index card assigned to a document to do a search 4. Field is a field from a template. So, for this, it s helpful to know which template to search OR, you can do a wild card and find ALL documents associated with a template. 5. Within Folder browse to the folder you wish to search and choose Within Folder to limit your search to specific types of documents