Laboratory information
Narrow operation
you cannot find more than one reference (and often none at all).
There are a couple of other things to watch: most importantly the searches are
very slow, taking up to a minute to complete, so if you select the
Start Search option and nothing seems to happen,
look carefully at the status messages produced by your browser, and make sure the
search has found something or failed before starting another one. If you find too
many references to display at once it will let you search again to narrow the scope
of what it has found; this search will be within the list of references
found by the first search, so this is a very crude way to combine searches using
different criteria.
If you retrieve too many references (e.g., by trying to find everything
written in French) it will simply display a rude message without keeping
any of the references themselves. It's always best to start with the search
that will yield the smallest number of references: for example if you're
interested in papers dealing with fire history written by a particular
author, search for the author name first, then narrow the search by looking
for fire in the keywords, rather than the other way round. The
searches are case sensitive, so if you are not sure if a work has an
initial capital letter, try dropping it and searching for the remainder of
the word (e.g., istory to match History and
history. Searching for ranges of publication dates at the moment
is difficult, since it treats these as just another text item to search.
For the advanced users amongst you: yes, you can use grep-style
regular expressions.
Once you have a summary display of the references, you can select each one in turn to view the full publication details, keywords, and abstracts. Unfortunately there isn't yet a way to download the references in a form which can be pasted directly into your own word processor or bibliographic database, but we are working on it (for now, try saving each reference as a small text file by going through the summary list and taking the appropriate selection in your browser - e.g., clicking the right mouse button in the Windows version of Netscape and choosing the Text option).
This is still experimental, so we would welcome reports of any problems you find, as well as suggestions for improvements.
Laboratory information