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Using the Advanced Search Page: A Case Study

Worldwide was recently contacted by a librarian who wanted to compile a list of publications related to the European Capital of Culture initiative. Each year the European Commission designates two different European cities or regions to serve as Europe's cultural capitals, which sparks a wide array of local events, including exhibitions. Although our records for such titles include the original series citation, she understandably found it hard to locate all the records on our website because the citation lacks consistency: each year, it is in a different language and/or format, reflecting the linguistic and stylistic preferences of the organizers and/or publishers. In order to facilitate her query, we felt it made sense to identify the titles ourselves and include them as a group on the Special Series dropdown menu of our Advance Search page. Now, a full list of the 58 European Capital of Culture titles that Worldwide has carried over the years is only a click away.

European Capital of Culture now available as a Special Series option.

Even without the new search feature that facilitates locating titles issued as part of this particular series of exhibitions, using other search options on the Advanced Search page could be used to help locate these titles.

The Approach

Simply entering "European Capital of Culture" in the title field of our Advanced Search page would not have yielded any results, because that phrase is rarely, if ever, included in the title of any pertinent publication. It is, however, almost always included in the colophon as a series citation. Occasionally, the link between the exhibition catalogue and the annual event is only mentioned or alluded to in the preface or introduction, and in such cases Worldwide takes the liberty of including a series citation in its title record as well. Therefore, entering the phrase in the exhibitor/organizer/publisher/series field would yield better results.

But not all titles can be identified this way. Using the English name as the keywords of the search is problematic: a few exceptions notwithstanding, the organizing committees prefer to cite the designation in their own language. The results of an English keyword search would include the books published on the occasion of Cork 2005 and Liverpool 2008, but not much else. Istanbul 2010 would also be included, because of a bilingual series citation, as would Stavanger 2008 (Norway). The variant citation "Cultural Capital of Europe" would not be included because the phrase is not an exact match.

Using the wildcard character * expands the results somewhat: using the search term "europ* cult*" yields all records that include words containing the fragment "europ" (Europe, europa, européen, europäische, Europalia, etc.) and words that contain the fragment "cult" (culture, cultura, cultural, cultivation, etc.). This type of search will cover more languages than English, but will also include many records for books that have nothing to do with the European Capital of Culture.

Using the wildcard character *.

A better method might be to look for the exact series citation. But there are 24 official languages in the European Union! One could possibly make educated guesses about the series citation in French (Capitale européenne de la culture), Italian (Capitale europea della cultura), German, Spanish or even Dutch, but what about less common languages, such as Bulgarian, Turkish or Latvian?

Some research on the website of the European Commission or on Wikipedia gives us a list of the cities and the year in which they were designated the European Capital of Culture. Using this information, a user could perform one query for each city and year to identify the related exhibition catalogues. The year could be entered as a search term in the exhibitor/organizer/publisher/series field, or in the year of publication field. If the latter is used, specifying a two- or three-year range using the < and > operators is recommended, because not all books are published the same year as the designation (e.g. Worldwide 62263 and 29029). 

Using operators < and > to specify a range of years: in this case "later than" 2006 and "earlier than" 2010 will find results for books published in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

The Results

The most effective way to identify all the European Capital of Culture titles would probably be a combination of the various website searches described above. For each of these searches a CSV file containing select records can be downloaded from the Search Results page. These files can easily be opened, edited and manipulated in a spreadsheet or database to compile a relevant bibliography.

Export selected titles in a .csv file.