Search help

edna>Help>Search help

About search

edna supports a range of search techniques that help you to discover relevant items within our metadata repository, as well as external trusted repositories.

Different ways to search

  • Standard search: search edna and other external education and training repositories.

  • Advanced search: scans metadata fields, e.g. title, subject, edna category. You can also filter by:
    • sector
    • edna collection types, events, groups, lists, news and resources
    • Australian sites only or all sites
    • thesauri
  • Distributed search: searches edna and selected external, trusted, quality education and training repositories.

  • Search via sectors: standard search is limited to a particular sector on that sector page. An advanced search option limited by sector is also available.

Standard search

This is the default search at the top right hand corner of every page. 

Enter a search term into the text box and click go or enter on your keyboard to search either all of  edna or select  'All' to search both edna and external education and training repositories.

Searching is not case-sensitive, so Education and education will retrieve the same results.

If you search for second life the search will retrieve records which contain both words second and life.  Putting single quotes 'second life' will find fewer records.

A search for All ( edna and all selected external repositories) will return the first 50 results in alphabetical order.

 

Advanced search

The advanced search enables you to focus your search very tightly. You can either:

1. Search on a combination of metadata fields. Because not all records have all fields, for best results use title, description and subject. 
 
2. Restrict your search to a particular edna resource or search all edna. These include:

  • edna Events Education and training events in Australia, overseas and online, special days and competitions

  • edna Groups Online collaborative spaces for Australian education and training organisations

  • edna Lists Online discussion and distribution email lists for the Australian education and training community

  • edna News News headlines from edna

  • edna Resources More than 25 000 quality-assured resources for school, early childhood, VET, ACE and higher education, with a focus on Australian education.

3. Restrict by sector e.g.

Adult and Community Education (ACE)
Early Childhood Education (ECE)
Higher Education
International Education
School Education
Vocational Education and Training (VET)

4. You can also restrict your search to web resources which have a .au extension, i.e. choose Australian sites only.

Note that sites without a .au extension may also be Australian or have Australian content.

Selecting a thesaurus

You can choose a particular thesaurus to help you focus your search. Available thesauri include:

  • AGIFT:  an Australian Government functional thesaurus. The terms are general and high level, e.g. 'education and training'.
  • ScOT:  the Schools Online Thesaurus developed by Curriculum Corporation includes terms related to the Australian and New Zealand school curriculum.
  • ATED: a standardised vocabulary reflecting terminology used to describe education research and practice in Australia. The thesaurus is developed and maintained by ACER Cunningham Library. 
  • VOCED: the thesaurus used by NCVER to catalogue research reports and papers for the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector.

Distributed search

Selected external repositories: 

ABC Online More than 500 000 web pages of content in categories including news, education, science, the arts and youth.

ACER EdResearch Online Research repository of over 10,000 online articles from leading educational journals available for purchase as downloadable pdf documents.

AEShareNet A database of learning materials owned by Australian organisations, with information on their licensing conditions.

ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) searches simultaneously across the contents of Australian university research repositories for theses; pre-prints; post-prints; journal articles; book chapters; music recordings and pictures.

Culture and Recreation Portal Online services and information in the fields of culture and recreation, from both government and private agencies.

Flexible Learning Framework Projects, reports, news and activities from the Australian Flexible Learning Framework designed to provide the vocational education and training (VET) system with essential e-learning infrastructure and expertise.

Government Education Portal An extensive range of education and training information from authoritative Australian federal, state and territory government sources.

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) A USA-based open repository of online learning materials designed primarily for staff and students of higher education.

myfuture Australian career information resources. Search across industries, occupations, education and training providers, courses and programs, awards and scholarships and organisations.

PictureAustralia More than one million images from culturally significant Australian online collections.

VOCED The NCVER database of vocational and technical education and training research abstracts.

How to use the Distributed Search:

Enter a term into the search box. This can be a single keyword, keywords or phrase.

All the words
Any of the words
The phrase
Any of the words is likely to give you the most results. The phrase will give you the smallest number of results.

All Repositories  is ticked as the default. To refine your search, remove that tick from the boxes, by clicking on the box of repositories you don't want to search.

Note: There is a wide range of other repositories; the range will continue to grow and change.  Please check the latest list of external repositories from the list above.

You can restrict your number of results to a manageable set. For multiple repository searches the maximum number of results is set to 200. This ensures a fast response to your search. For a single repository search the default is set to 50 results. If you would like to see more or less displayed, select your preference from the drop-down list.

You can also specify how many results you see on the search results page. You may want to just see the top 10 and then if you don't find what you are looking for, visit the second page of results. Or, you may wish to see more results and scan through them quickly. Select your preference from the drop-down list.

You may also specify a case-sensitive search. This may be useful if searching on an acronym, e.g. ARC. 

Sector search

Sector searching allows you to search for resources, edna categories and external repositories specific to a particular educational sector. The entry point to the sector standard and advanced search is found at the top right of the sector pages. The sector advanced search operates in the same way as the general advanced search but content results will reflect  the particular sector that you are within. The external respositories are also specific to the particular sector you are within.

Search results

The result details will vary depending on the generating repository, but all results include a title, a URL and a description. edna search results also include the edna categories the record belongs to and the date the record was entered into the edna repository. If you click on the category name you will be able to view all the resources in that category. You will also be able to view the metadata record of a particular item by clicking on the full record option.

Search result summary

The search result summary box will appear in all search result screens.  This allows you to refine your search to other edna sections. For example, you search on the term online training then once the result screen appears you can click on edna Events, from the search result summary box and this will redo your search within this edna section.

Get all results

The get all results animated icon and link text appears when you search over multiple repositories. This offers quicker results from some repositories than to wait for the search to return all results.  You must click on Get all results to update the result set.  Keep clicking until the animated icon and link text disappears. 

Thesaurus

Within the search result screen you also have the Thesaurus functionality.  This allows you to try suggested broader, narrower or like terms.

Search results in RSS format

RSS - Really Simple Syndication, provides a convenient way for you to receive content feeds from a variety of sources.

edna provides a range of web services in RSS format. On all search results pages you can click on the RSS icon to get the RSS format. 

To receive a search result in RSS format, right-click on the icon or words, and select copy shortcut to copy the location of the service. Paste this location into the appropriate RSS reader by following the instructions within that application.

Another method is to right-click on the search RSS feed link to open in a new window, select the URL in the address bar, and copy and paste it into your feed reader.

For further information and help on RSS visit the RSS help page.