Page by Page Guide
Getting Started
Browsers
My Archive
Register/Log In
Adding material to My Archive
My Bookshelf
My Lightbox
Documents
Overview and Browsing
Document Details Page
Download Options, Saving, Rotating and Printing
Viewing the Original Image
Share
Searching
Basic Search
Search Directories
Boolean Functionality
Advanced Search
Search Results
Viewing Search Results
Explore
Chronology
Essays
Biographies
External Links
Further Resources
AM Explorer
Exporting Citations
OpenURLs
Getting Started
Before beginning to use China: Trade, Policits & Culture users may find it helpful to consult the background information contained in the ‘Nature and Scope' pages found in the 'Introduction' section of this website.
In addition to this, you can view our video introduction from academic consultant Dr Gordon Barrett.
Browsers
China: Trade, Politics & Culture is optimised to use the following browsers: Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer 10 and 11, and the latest releases of Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome.
My Archive
Click the link in the top right-hand corner to register for 'My Archive' or log in. My Archive enables users to benefit from a range of bespoke features that allow you to create your own personalised collection.
If you are registering for the first time, click on the Register link and enter your details into the form provided. Your first name and last name will be displayed on the site once you have logged in. A link to the privacy policy is included at the bottom of the form.
Adding Material to My Archive
Once you've logged in, you will be able to:
- Save selected documents to My Bookshelf.
- Save any image from the collection to My Lightbox.
- Run a slideshow of your Lightbox images.
- Save your search results.
Every document, search result and individual image in China: Trade, Politics & Culture is tagged with the relevant 'Add to My Archive' button. To return to any document without the need to browse or search every time, simply click on the add button and it will automatically be stored in your individual account so you can return to it at any time.
My Bookshelf
Click the 'My Lightbox' or 'My Archive' links in the top right-hand corner to enter these features.
Once in 'My Archive' you can edit your profile, navigate to 'My Lightbox', view saved searches and view saved documents.
Click on a saved search term to view saved search results. Click on thumbnails in 'My Bookshelf' to view your saved documents.
My Lightbox
You can organise the images in 'My Lightbox' at any time by creating a new lightbox. Enter the name of your new lightbox in the box beside 'Create a New Lightbox:' and click 'Create'. Use the tick boxes beside each image to select the images you wish to copy to your new lightbox. In the 'Image Options' menu, click 'Copy selection to another lightbox' to copy the selected images.
You can view your selection of images as a slideshow and export as PDFs by selecting these options from the 'Image Options' menu.
Documents Overview and Browsing
Users can browse the documents in China: Trade, Politics & Culture by clicking on the Documents tab. This will take you to a list of all the documents in the resource.
Documents are loaded 200 to a page in alphabetical order by title. Users can browse previous and next pages, select a page number or a letter from the alphabetical list.
Alternatively, the user can refine the list by Date, Document Type, Library/Archive or Region using the menu provided to the left of the list.
From this page users can sort the order of each column and also select the display of the last column to feature either Region, Document Types or Library/Archive. Use the 'clear filter' option to return to the default alphabetical list.
Full text searchable documents are indicated with the following icon 
Documents can be refined by Document Type, Library/Archive or Region using the filter options on the left-hand side. Select a category, or multiple categories, and click 'Apply' to refine the list. Use the Clear Filters button in order to return to the default alphabetical list. The columns can also be reordered according to Title, Date and Region, using the arrows next to the column headings.
Document Details Page
From the document list, click on any of the title links and this will take you to the Document Details page for that item. This page provides thumbnail images from the document, full bibliographic information, document-level metadata and the ability to start viewing the original image or select some or all of the document to download.
Scroll through thumbnails to select and view images.
Use the 'next' and 'previous' buttons to show the next or previous documents in the document list. Use the back arrow beside the 'next' and 'previous' buttons to go back to the document list.
Download the full document as a PDF or download a range of pages using the PDF drop-down selection boxes.
Where available, additional 'Chapter', 'Section' or 'Issues' information will be displayed underneath the metadata.
From this page you can also add the document to 'My Archive' and you can export the bibliographic details of each document to RefWorks or EndNote citation software.
Download Options, Saving, Rotating and Printing
For the best-quality printout, it is recommended that you download the required image or images as a PDF. Within the Document Details and the image-viewing pages you have several printing options. From the Document Details page you can download the entire contents of the document or specify a page or image range as a PDF document which can then be saved to file or printed. The image or page numbers available will be displayed in a drop-down box. Click on the required image/page to select the range to be downloaded.
When there is a page range provided there are sometimes a number of 'unpaginated' images listed at the start of those available to download. These images can also be selected to download as each 'unpaginated image' listed represents an image. For example, if there are six 'unpaginated images' listed and you want to download them all, simply select the first image listed in the drop-down box and then select the sixth unpaginated image listed in the second drop-down box.
From the image view, you can download the current page you are viewing or, where available, specific chapters as a PDF document. Clicking on these options will open a new window for the PDF to download. Please bear in mind when downloading entire documents that many of the files will be quite large and can take some time. You will require Adobe Reader for this facility, which can be downloaded for free online.
Viewing the Original Image
Clicking on the thumbnail, title or a particular chapter will generate the image-viewing screen. The user can increase or decrease the magnification of the original image by using the + or - symbols in the top left-hand corner of theimage viewerr window. To move around the image the user can drag the document by holding down the left mouse button and then moving the mouse to the preferred view.
The expand icon will open the image viewer in full screen.
The arrow icons will rotate the image, which will resize to fit screen view.
There are various ways to navigate through a document and you can also download images to print or save. Where available, some printed documents will have additional navigation features such as jumping to the next chapter or selecting a specific page number.
Clicking on the Thumbnails tab will display all the thumbnails for the document.
Share Functionality
By clicking on the 'Share' button in the top right-hand corner of the page, users can bookmark and share the page they are viewing via a range of web-based resources and social networking sites.
Searching
The search engine searches across all document-level metadata including bibliographic details, full text of material with transcripts and selected additional editorial features.
Searches are carried out at document level for all documents and also at image level for full text search documents. Please note that a search for "maritime AND customs" will find hits at a document level i.e. where both appear on a page but also where ‘maritime’ appears on page 1 and ‘customs’ on page 100 of the same document.
Image-level searches in China: Trade, Politics & Culture will be highlighted on the original image.
Basic Search
A basic keyword search box is available on all screens in the top right-hand corner. Type in your search term and either click on 'Go' or press Enter. Users can also integrate their searches with Boolean text for more advanced queries. Underneath the basic search box are links to the Advanced Search option.
To aid researchers, the terms used in the metadata are listed in the Search Directories, broken down by Names, Places and Topics. Click on a term to discover its occurrences in the documents.
Boolean Functionality
Boolean Operators
The keyword search supports the Boolean operators AND, OR and AND NOT between keywords. Using the terms ‘mission’ and ‘bible’ as examples:
To return results in which both ‘mission’ and ‘bible’ appear, use AND between terms (TIP: the search engine already does this by default – see the section on Automatic AND Queries).
To return results which have either ‘mission’ or ‘bible’, add OR between terms.
To return results in which ‘bible’, but not ‘mission’ appears, add AND NOT between terms. This will search for ‘bible’ but exclude any pages which also include ‘mission’.
TIP: You can use either upper or lower case for Boolean terms.
Automatic AND Queries
By default, the search engine only returns results which contain all your keywords. The search engine automatically uses the AND operator, so there is no need to use this when searching for multiple terms.
TIP: To broaden or refine the keyword search, try using fewer or more terms.
Phrase Searching
By adding double quotation marks to your keywords you can search for exact phrases. Words enclosed in quotation marks (“missionary family”) will only return results in which the words appear next to each other.
Please note that if you perform a phrase search, the number of hits displayed will still appear as individual words (e.g. if the phrase “missionary family” appears on a page twice, the results will show four hits.
Wildcards
Wildcards allow you to search for parts of words, enabling you to widen your search criteria. The search engine supports two types of wildcards; "?" represents one character, and "*" represents any number of characters. For example, entering book? will return results for books, but entering book* will return results for book, books, bookish, bookseller etc. You can also use wildcards to search for words as part of a phrase.
Plurals
The search engine does not automatically find plurals of search terms. If you want to look for both book and books, use the Word Stemming option under the Advanced Search or the "*" wildcard.
Using Word Proximity Searches
The search engine will let you look for words or phrases that occur within a specified number of words of each other. This is a useful way of specifying the context in which words should occur. For example, a search for "mission w/3 bible" may be a more accurate way of finding references to specific details than using a simple "AND" operator, but offers a broader net than that of a phrase search.
Word Stemming
By ticking the Word Stemming option on the Advanced Search page, you can command the search engine to return results on all derivations of your search word(s). Thus a stemming-enabled keyword search for "book" will return book, books, booked, etc. However, it will not return different words that simply begin with book (e.g. bookseller, bookkeeper). For this, you need to use a wildcard.
Advanced Search
The Advanced Search page enables users to search for several keywords or phrases using the AND, OR and NOT Boolean operators. Extra fields can be added using the button.
TIP: Use of these drop-down operators still follows the Boolean rules of precedence.
A date-range restriction can be entered. This can be used in conjunction with a keyword or other restricted searches, or across all documents by leaving the other fields blank.
Searches can also be restricted by Document Type and Library/Archive, and by Image Gallery and/or Secondary Sources.
Search Results
At the top of the search results page, the user can select to filter results by just Documents, Image Gallery or Secondary Resources, or refine via the filters on the left-hand side. Users can export results as an email.
At the top of the list of search results, the user can choose to view a frequency graph, which shows the number of relevant documents and search results per year.
When the user selects a document from the search results list, they will be taken to the Document Details page, where further details of the result will be displayed.
Full text search results will be displayed with a list of the relevant snippets from the document. Clicking on one of these will take the user to the relevant page.
These results can be reordered on the bases of pages, relevance or number of hits.
To view the full document metadata click on the 'Show details' button at the top of the page. If there is a hit from the document-level metadata, then this will be highlighted.
TIP: If the document is returned in the search results with no full text hits, the metadata will be opened automatically.
Use the next and previous arrows to browse to the next documents with hits, or return to the search results.
Viewing Search Results
View the relevant image from the full text search results by selecting the link above the original image snippet. You can view the document from the beginning by clicking on the thumbnail image.
Full text hits are highlighted in yellow on the original image.
Use the 'prev hit' and 'next hit' buttons above the image to browse to the next and previous hits within the document.
Chronology
The Chronology tab opens an interactive chronology in a new window. This chronology is based around the source materials included in China: Trade, Politics & Culture. Browse the chronology by moving the slider at the top of the page or scrolling down through the entries.
Search the chronology by keyword using the search bar, or select from the list of categories shown to refine the results.
Click on an image to expand it or click 'View related document' to view it in the resource. 
Essays
This section provides the user with two essays written by leading academics. The essays include hypertext links to the original documents. Clicking on a link will open a new window and if the link relates to a complete document the user will be taken to the Document Details page from where you can browse the images. If the link relates to a specific page or folio, the user will be taken to the first relevant image. To return to the essay simply close or minimise the new window.
TIP: The printer icon will generate a printable version of the essay.
TIP: The PDF icon will generate a PDF version.
Biographies
An extensive collection of individuals are represented on our Biographies page, which provides biographic information on political figures, legislaters, monarchs and other key figures to aid your research. Click on the name of a person to search for them within the resource.
The External Links option in the 'Explore' page provides a list of websites with important and interesting material on relating to the history of China, along with a brief overview. Click on the link in the title of each site and it will open in a new window.
Please note that while every effort has been made to provide links to sites created by recognised institutions, Adam Matthew Group is not responsible for their content.
Maps and Image Gallery
The Maps and Image Gallery tab both show a curated collection of the visual sources from the collections and share functionality. By clicking on maps you will see every map in the collection. By clicking on Image Gallery you have the option to refine by further image types.
In an image gallery, you can choose to display the images as the default small thumbnails or as larger thumbnails with image details in list view, using the Display Options drop-down.
To view a slideshow of images, select the images you want to use by selecting the tick box next to each title, then clicking 'Run slideshow of selection' from the 'Image Options' drop-down. Alternatively, you can save the selection for this session (hover over the 'Image Options' drop-down and click ‘Add Selection to My Lightbox'), or download the selection as a multi-page PDF.
TIP: The order that you select your images will be the order that they are played in the slideshow.
To view a full-size version of the image, click on it. You can browse through the images by clicking the 'Next' and 'Previous' buttons, or by using the left and right arrows on your keyboard.
Metadata relating to the slideshow material can be searched in isolation via the 'Visual Sources Advanced Search' field.
AM Explorer
AM Explorer is a federated searching tool that gives you a quick and convenient way to search across all Adam Matthew collections. You will only be able to access document collections that your library is subscribed to. A link to AM Explorer is available on the footer of every page. Whenever you search in China: Trade, Politics & Culture, AM Explorer will alert you to relevant results another Adam Matthew resource, Eighteenth Century Drama. Please see the Search Results section of this page for more information.
Exporting Citations
You can export the bibliographic details of each document to RefWorks, EndNote Zotero if you have user rights to these systems. These options are available to you on the Document Details page of each individual item. Just click the RefWorks or EndNote logos, and a pop-up window with instructions will appear.
OpenURLs
OpenURLs connect you directly to your library catalogue, allowing you to easily access material recommended on this site. You will find OpenURLs on the essay pages, or anywhere we suggest you continue your research using library materials. Click on the reference to send this item to your institution’s link resolver and establish the easiest way to access this material that is not directly available on this site. Please note that your institution must have registered their link-resolver details with Adam Matthew Digital for the OpenURL links to be visible and active.