Search guide

Search

The database contains records of cantatas and arias in manuscript and print form composed between approximately 1620 and the early nineteenth century. Bibliographic units are catalogued in their entirety, including the possible presence of other types of composition: sacred music, instrumental music, polyphonic compositions.

Search results are presented in order of relevance, calculated from the number of occurrences of the search terms in the indices produced from each record. Occurrences in some indices (title, author, incipit) are weighted more heavily than others (notes, shelfmark, etc.) according to the values documented at the bottom of this page.

How texts are indexed

Before being added to the indices, the texts of the records pass through a series of processors that perform, in sequence:

• normalization of uppercase, lowercase and accented letters;
• separation of words joined by apostrophe or other punctuation (tokenization);
• discarding of words shorter than two characters;
• discarding of words not useful for searching: definite, indefinite and partitive articles (stop words); prepositions are not discarded;
• reduction of the remaining words to their root form via stemming, using the Snowball algorithm (library wamania/php-stemmer).

Simple search

By default the search is performed across all indices simultaneously, looking for all the words in the query string with the AND Boolean operator, in whatever order they were entered.

Stemming means the search matches by word root: searching for mortali will also return results containing mortale and mortal; searching for partir will find records containing parti, parte, partite, parto, partia, partirai, parta, as well as partir.

For example, searching for legrenzi rigide orme returns the record of Giovanni Legrenzi's cantata "Aureo serto real sei pur pesante", whose text contains the verses "Poiché con rigid'orme / Le calpesta i pensier sogno tremante".

Searching for gli orologi reale achille returns Giovanni Legrenzi's cantata "O grandezze reali", with work title "Orologio siete voi", referring to a work with alternative title "Achille in Sciro".

Partial-word searching beyond stemming is not available, as it would introduce excessive noise in the results. For example, the root of the word orologio is orolog: searches for orologio, orologi or orolog yield the same results, while a search for orol returns no results.

Advanced search

The advanced search form lets you restrict the search to one or more specific indices. Up to five criteria can be combined, each applied to an index chosen from:

• All fields — extended simple search across all indices;
• Work title — uniform title of the linked work;
• Diplomatic title — title as it appears on the document;
• Poetic text — text transcription and incipit;
• Linked person — any role (composer, librettist, dedicatee, owner, performer, copyist, etc.), including name variants;
• Scoring — natural-language description of voices and instruments;
• Library — RISM siglum of the holding library;
• Shelfmark — document call number;
• Notes — general record notes;
• Watermark — watermark description.

Criteria entered on different rows are combined with AND (all criteria must be satisfied). Within a single criterion, multiple words are also combined with AND.

Modifying the active search

When search results are displayed, the currently active filters appear at the top of the page as labelled chips. Each chip shows the name of the index and the searched term. Clicking the "✕" icon removes that single criterion while preserving the others. The "Modify advanced search" link returns to the advanced search form with all current criteria pre-populated, ready to be modified and re-submitted.

Field weights (boost values)

When a search term is found, its weight in the relevance calculation depends on the index in which it appears. The applied boost values are:

Features under development

The following features are currently being implemented:

• Exact phrase search: enclosing a string in quotation marks will enforce word order;
• Negative search: prefixing a word with a minus sign (−) will exclude records containing that word from the results;
• Variant spelling search: a search for "pietà" will also find "pietade", "core" will find "cuore", and so on;
• Facets: filters alongside results for document type, record type, dating, country, musical presentation, summary scoring;
• Authority lists: direct navigation of authority files for authors, works, libraries, watermarks and bibliography.