Help : Berg Fashion Library

Help

1 Welcome

This User's Guide and Site Help provides the information you need to use and understand the features, content, and functions within the Berg Fashion Library.

1.1 User's Guide and Site Help

You can navigate this Guide by selecting a topic among the links at the left. It can also be read from beginning to end as a general introduction to using the site.

On the main navigation bar of the site you will always find a context-sensitive Help link. Selecting this link will open a section of this Help file with content relevant to the function or content you are currently viewing.

1.2 Other Resources

If you do not find the information you need, other useful resources include:

our FAQs, which answer specific editorial, customer service, and technical questions; and
the About page which offers a wide range of general information and details about the content and features in the Berg Fashion Library.

If you still have questions about the site after consulting Help and these other pages, please contact Customer Service.

2 Accessing the site

After your subscription setup is complete, there are a variety of ways to access the site.

2.1. Automatic Authentication

Automatic authentication is the most common means of accessing the contents of the Berg Fashion Library. Most institutions will set up their access via IP-authentication or URL referrer. If you come to the site through a subscribing institution, you will automatically be logged in when you access the site - you don't have to do anything.

If you believe your institution subscribes, but you are not automatically logged in when you go to the site, please consult your librarian or library administrator.

Librarians, you can find out about setting up your institution via Subscriber Services.

2.2. Username and Password

The login boxes on the Berg Fashion Library home page

If you have password access to the site, type your username and password into the login fields on the home page.

Remember that your password is case-sensitive.

If you have forgotten your password, follow this link to be reminded of your password.

If you have problems logging in, please contact Customer Service.

Some institutions require username and password authentication. If you do not know your institution's log in details, please consult your librarian.

2.3. Athens Access

If your institution uses Eduserv's Athens service, simply select the Login with Athens link on the Home page to reach your Athens login area.

2.4. Shibboleth Access

If your institution uses authentication via Shibboleth, simply select the Login with Shibboleth link on the home page.

2.5 Library Card

Some libraries allow remote access to websites to which they subscribe. Your librarian can tell you if that option is available to you.

If your library does allow remote access, select the Login with your Library Card link and then enter your library card number in the Library Card field on the home page. If you encounter difficulties entering the site using your library card number, please contact your librarian.

3 The basics

3.1. Structure

A. Site Header

The site header never changes, and it includes the Berg Fashion Library banner, which is available on every page of the site. You can always click the banner to return to the home page:

The links in the top right corner provide access to information about the site and the subscription service, and access to your personalised area of the Berg Fashion Library:

Sign In: If you have created a personal username in the Berg Fashion Library, use this link to sign in to access your saved searches and content.
Sign Up: Use this link to create a personal username in the Berg Fashion Library to begin saving content and searches – see below for more information.
Contact Us: Use this form to submit comments or questions regarding the content of the site, sales inquiries or access and technical problems.
Subscriber Services: Subscribers to the Berg Fashion Library can access their account details, update account information, retrieve usage statistics, and enable OpenURL access.
FAQs: Answers to frequently asked questions about the Berg Fashion Library, covering content, subscriptions, access, accessibility and technical aspects.
Help: Comprehensive help information about the Berg Fashion Library site and services.

Once you are logged in, the Quick Search box will be available in the upper right area of all pages on the site. To start exploring, enter a word or phrase into the search box and select GO.

B. Site Navigation Bar

Once you are logged in, the site navigation bar never changes and gives you various access to more information about the Berg Fashion Library, and to the taxonomy browse feature.

Home: Clicking on this link will return you to the home page.
About: Offers a wide range of general information and details about the content and features in the Berg Fashion Library.
Take a Tour: Presents a downloadable guided tour of the content and features of the Berg Fashion Library
How to Order: Provides information about how to subscribe to the Berg Fashion Library, and about any current special offers
Browse: Access to the interactive browse tool, driven by the tailor-made Berg Fashion Library taxonomy—see Browse by taxonomy for more information
Help: Context-sensitive help information

Additional tools in this bar include:

the Highlight and Find tool: if you select a word or phrase anywhere on the page and click this, your selected text will populate the search box and the Berg Fashion Library will be searched automatically using that word or phrase
My Content: links to all content items that you have viewed in a session are stored here for immediate retrieval—a count of the content items you have viewed is shown in parentheses. Hover over the link to bring a drop-down of the items, which you can select to return to that item:

My Searches: links to all of the searches you have performed in a session, with hit counts, for rapid retrieval—a count of all the searches you have performed is shown in parentheses. Hover over the link to bring a drop-down of the searches, which you can select to perform that search again:

3.2. Content Types

The site consists of content types from a number of different sources. Categories relating to these sources are used in the interactive browser which allows you to choose and filter content within Search and Browse results. General descriptions of each type of content are on the About pages.

The Berg Fashion Library contains:

reference articles (the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion and the A-Z of Fashion)
eBooks
images from the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion
museum and gallery collections pages (descriptive and directory information for outstanding fashion collections)
collection objects (illustrated and with full descriptive information)
dictionary entries (from the Berg Dictionary of Fashion History)

4 Search

The Berg Fashion Library allows you to search its content using both the Quick Search box at the top right of every page and the Advanced Search form, accessed from the link to the right of the quick search box.

You can also perform image-only searches to access just the content from the Berg Fashion Library's image bank.

There are a number of features and controls on results pages to allow you to filter results and navigate through them, both for general result sets and for results from the image bank.

4.1 Basic Guide for Conducting Searches

The following rules apply to all of the searches on the site.

4.1.1. Exact matches

Use quotation marks to tell Search that you are looking for a specific phrase and word order. For example:

bowler hat

will return any results in which both the term "bowler" and the term "hat" appear. A search for these terms within quotes,

"bowler hat"

will return only results that have the exact phrase "bowler hat".

4.1.2. Boolean operators

Search supports the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT.

AND

Unless you tell it otherwise, Search assumes that you only want results in which ALL of your search terms appear. This means that there is an implicit "AND" between all your search terms. So entering:

silk gown

will return the same results as if you had entered:

silk AND gown

You can use the OR operator to tell Search to return results in which either search term exists. For instance, if you enter:

jacket OR blazer

your results will include any article in which either "jacket" or "blazer" exists.

NOT

The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT. For example,

hat NOT fedora

will return all results for "hat" which do not include the term "fedora".

Nesting commands

Boolean commands can be nested for more complex searches. Parentheses tell Search which expressions to evaluate first, before combining with other Boolean operators. For example:

(panama OR fedora) NEAR "california"

4.1.3. Wildcards

You can use the * and ? wildcards in most non-numeric search fields. The question mark or ? character represents any single character.

For example cha?el will return results for Chanel and chapel.

The asterisk or * character represents any number of characters.

Entering bead* will return results for beads, beaded and beadwork.

4.1.4. Special characters

The site permits searching with or without diacritical marks. Thus, a search for

cristobal

will return results that match the name Cristóbal, as will a search for:

cristóbal

4.1.5. Case sensitivity and punctuation

Search in the Berg Fashion Library is not case sensitive.

Punctuation characters are not treated as significant, so the two terms:

short lived

short-lived

will both return a content item containing the text "Although the movement was short lived, it exposed entrenched gender stereotypes"

4.1.6. "Stop" words

By default, Search ignores certain common words in English. The stop words we use on the site are: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, such, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, with.

Therefore a search entered as

dress and fashion in new zealand

will seek out the works "dress" and "fashion" and "new" and "zealand", and ignore the words "and" and "in".

To conduct an efficient search for a specific phrase containing stop words, enter your words surrounded by quotation marks:

"dress and fashion in new zealand"

4.2 Quick Search

The Quick Search box appears in the top right of every page on the site. Enter your term into the box and select GO.

Quick Search performs a full-text search on the following content types within the Berg Fashion Library:

reference articles
eBook chapters
captions for images from the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion
addresses and descriptions of museum and gallery collections
descriptions and summary information relating to collection objects

4.3 Image-only searches

Check the box to the right of the GO button to limit your search to the Berg Fashion Library's image bank:

The content items returned will be either images from the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, images representing collection objects, or a mixture of both (depending on your search term).

4.4 Advanced Search

The Advanced Search form can be reached by selecting the link to the right of the Quick Search box on the site header:

The Advanced Search form is made up of three parts:

full-text searching
bibliographic criteria
image criteria

The full-text portion of the form may be used on its own, or in conjunction with either of the other two portions.

The bibliographic and image portions may each be used in isolation.

A search that uses both bibliographic and image portions won't return any results, since each portion addresses different types of content, making it impossible to return content items that combine all criteria.

4.4.1 Full-text searching

In this part of the form you can specify words or phrases, and the roles they are to play in your search:

You can specify that a full-text search should match:

on all of the words you enter
on the words you enter as an exact phrase
on any of the words you enter
none of the words you enter

You can use any combination of these fields in your search.

Note that in order to search for an exact phrase, you do not need to enter your term in double quotes.

By default the full text content of the Berg Fashion Library is searched. You can use the Search in drop-down menu, however, to restrict the scope of your full-text search to:

the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion
eBooks

4.4.2 Bibliographic criteria

In this part of the form you can specify bibliographic criteria that will allow you to find content from particular books within the Berg Fashion Library:

title
author
publication date
ISBN or ISSN
digital object identifier (DOI)

Note that for this search, the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion is classified as a reference work, so does not fall within the scope of these criteria.

4.4.3 Image criteria

In this part of the form you can specify criteria relating to collection objects to return a set of corresponding images:

Advanced search objects fields

object type (e.g. jacket, gown)
designer or manufacturer (e.g. Chanel, Birkenstock)
object date
place (e.g. Paris)

4.5 Results

4.5.1 Search Results Ranking and Ordering

The search results you see on your screen are derived from a set of general rules:

By default the results of a search are ranked by relevance. This means results are ranked according to the frequency of your term/s occurrence in a document, relative to its occurrence in other documents. When more than one search term is entered, proximity of terms is not considered (except in the case of the use of quotation marks).
Searches use an implicit "and" between terms.
Searches are case-insensitive when all search terms are in lower-case.
Searches are diacritic-insensitive.
Searches are punctuation-insensitive, unless punctuation is also a common diacritical mark (ex: insensitive to hyphens; aware of apostrophes)
Highest ranking is given to an occurrence of your search term/s in the titles and headwords for content. Subheadings are next in rank. Full text is ranked last.

4.5.2 Navigating Search Results

The results page on the Berg Fashion Library

At the top of the results page you see the total number of text content items that have been returned by your search in bold, and the number within that total that are being displayed.

Your search term or terms are shown in a box below the total. Each word or phrase may be removed as a criterion by selecting the red 'x' to its right. All search terms may be removed at once by selecting 'clear all'—the effect of this is to return the complete contents of the Berg Fashion Library as a results set.

You can modify your search criteria by selecting Modify Search on the right-hand side of the page.

You can control the number of text content items that are presented, and how the items are sorted. By default, they are sorted by relevance, the alternative options being:

Title (the identifying label of the content item, e.g. the article title)
Source (the name of the content set from which the item is drawn, e.g. book title)

You can navigate directly to a particular page within the results set by selecting the relevant page number on the right-hand side.

If your search term matches a headword in the Berg Dictionary of Fashion History, this entry is shown in a box at the top of the results list.

Select the item's title to go to the full presentation of the content.

If your search term matches content relating to images from the Berg Fashion Library's image bank, thumbnails (up to twelve) of these images are shown on the right of the results page, above which is shown the total number of images returned. You can select any of these thumbnails to be taken to the full presentation of the image or object, or select more images below to be taken to an image results page (see below).

4.5.3 Navigating Image Results

You see an Image Results page if you selected Images Only for a Quick Search, or you selected more images from a general results page.

The item totals and current subtotals are shown as with general results, as are your search term(s) and the link to modify them.

The image results are presented as thumbnails arranged as a 'lightbox'. As you move your mouse over them, the thumbnails become fully-illuminated, and brief information about the image or object is displayed:

A pop-up window with more image information

If there is more than one image associated with a collection object, you can navigate through the thumbnails of these image using the arrows next to the numbers below the thumbnail.

Selecting any of these thumbnails will take you to the full presentation of this image or collection object.

If there are more images available than can be shown one page, you can move from one set to the next by selecting the large arrows to the left and right of the current page. Alternatively, you can move the slider across the bar of grey thumbnails shown above the current set on the left:

By default, image thumbnails are shown at medium size. You can see more thumbnails in your results page at a smaller image size, or fewer thumbnails at a larger image size, by selecting the appropriate icon in the zoom control above the current set on the right:

5 Browse

There are three ways of browsing content within the Berg Fashion Library:

5.1 Browse by taxonomy

5.1.1 The Berg Fashion Library taxonomy

The Berg Fashion Library taxonomy has been created by Berg specifically for the new discipline of fashion studies. It offers a broad range of high-level classification facets:

Dress
People & Organizations
Period
Place
Textiles & Materials
The Fashion Industry
Themes

Below these top-level classifications are finer-grained lower levels (down to a maximum of four), which represent increasingly-specific classifications. For example:

Place > North America > United States of America > New York > New York City

The content within the Berg Fashion Library has been indexed according to this taxonomy, and is discoverable through the taxonomy.

5.1.2 The taxonomy viewer

The taxonomy viewer is an interactive set of controls that presents the taxonomy as it applies to the indexing in the current results set. With it you can:

see the classification facets available at a particular level
expand a particular facet to see the finer-grained classifications at a lower level
select a facet at any level below the top level to see content that has been indexed with that classification

The taxonomy viewer is reached in two ways:

by selecting Browse on the primary navigation bar
by expanding the viewer icon to the right of a general results page

To begin using the viewer, select (click on) one of the top-level facets which are shown on the left side; the available lower-level facets on the next level down will appear to the right as a column.

If there are more facets for this level than can be shown in the column, you can scroll the list up and down by using the arrow controls at the top and bottom of the column:

The scroll control for the taxonomy viewer

As you move the mouse over each facet, its label (text) is highlighted in green, and if it too has lower-level facets (children) then an arrow is formed to show that it can be expanded:

To select this facet (i.e. to bring back all content that has been classified with it), simply click on it. The page will reload, and show the relevant content in the area below the viewer.

To expand this facet (i.e. to see the lower-level facets), click on the arrow head on the right which highlights in green when your mouse is in the correct position:

When you have selected a facet and the page has reloaded to show the content indexed for your chosen facet, the taxonomy viewer is once again available as before. This time, the viewer will show only the facets that apply to the subset of the content you have created with your previous selection.

In this way, you can apply as many different facets as you wish to help find exactly the content you wish to find.

The collection objects in the Berg Fashion Library are indexed according to the date when the object was made, which means you can navigate along a timeline that spans the collections, select a time period, and see images of the objects within your chosen period. You can then navigate from there to a page for a particular collection object.

5.2 Browse by time

5.2.1 Timeline viewer

The explore by time interface

The timeline viewer can be accessed via the Explore by Time link at the lower left of the home page.

The viewer is made up of three parts:

the timeline itself, which shows the span of dates reflected in the Berg Fashion Library's collection objects
the image carousel, showing images for collection objects with your chosen period
a context window, showing geographical information about the current object and other available images

5.2.1.1 Timeline

The timeline extends from the date of the earliest collection object in the Berg Fashion Library to the present day.

It carries a slider control which shows the current time period, as a span of twenty years:

Timeline slider control

You can move this slider to the left or to the right to select the period for which you wish to see collection objects—when you release the mouse images relating to your selection will be shown in the image carousel (see below).

5.2.1.2 Image carousel

This shows images of objects relating to your chosen time period:

Timeline image carousel

The central image is the active image, and selecting this will take you to a page showing full information for the object.

You can move the carousel forwards or backwards by using the large arrows to the left and right.

5.2.1.3 Context window

The context window shows more information for the object.

Timeline context window

The world map will illuminate the relevant continent for the object to place it in its geographic context. As you move from image to image in the carousel, this illumination will change accordingly.

If there is more than one image for an object available (e.g. if an item of clothing has been photographed from a variety of aspects) the alternative thumbnails are shown—selecting any of these will take you to a page showing full information for the object

5.2 Browse by place

The Berg Fashion Library's content covers every corner of the globe, and the browse by place feature allows you to view the content indexed for various geographic areas, via an interactive map of the world:

interactive=

The interactive map can be accessed via the Explore by Place link at the lower right of the home page.

As you move your mouse over the various parts of the world the area lights up and shows the name of the area. Brief information about the Berg Fashion Library's coverage of this area is shown on the right.

Clicking on the area brings a pop-up window with a sample of the available content in each of three areas:

the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion
other textual content
images and collection objects

Explore by place pop-up

From here, you can select any individual content item, or select the more links to see a full listing of content from that source or in that format.

6 Viewing content

6.1 Encyclopedia entry

An article from the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion

Entries from the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion show, above the article title, the volume and the part from which the article is drawn. To the left, other articles from the same part are shown as (with the current article in context), and sub-sections within the current article are shown. All of these are links.

Images embedded within articles may be selected to produce a pop-window with a higher-quality version of the same image, together with the caption information.

6.2 Book chapter view

A chapter from a Berg book

Chapters from eBooks show to the left the title of the book from which the content is drawn, with the current chapter placed in context within a table of contents.

The book title may be selected for bibliographic information about the title from which the chapter is drawn.

6.3 Book view

A book page

Information about a complete title is presented above a table of contents; you can select items from the table of contents to be taken to a chapter view page.

6.4 A-Z of Fashion view

An article from the A-Z of Fashion

Articles from the A-Z of Fashion offer a selectable table of sub-sections to the left, above a list of the cross-references embedded within the article.

6.5 Encyclopedia image view

An image from the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion

Images from the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion in search result sets link through to a page that presents the image with its caption and credit information.

To the left is a link to the encyclopedia article from which the image is drawn.

6.6 Museum collection view

A page for a museum collection

Information about a museum or gallery collection related to dress and fashion is presented as combination of directory information to the left (including a link to the collection's website), and descriptive information in the main part of the page.

If the Berg Fashion Library has images of objects in the collection these are shown in the lower part of the page. You can browse the images in the carousel by selecting the left or right arrows, and selecting the full-size image will take you to an object view page. Thumbnails may be selected to bring a full-size image into the image carousel.

6.7 Object view

A page for a museum object

Images of objects from museum collections are accompanied by descriptive information and, to the left, summary information such as date, creator and dimensions.

If more than one image for the object is available these are shown to the right of the main image, and may be selected to view the chosen image at full size.

6.8 Dictionary view

A dictionary entry

Entries from the Berg Dictionary of Fashion History show the period for which the term and definition apply, and (by means of M or F) whether the term applies to male or female dress.