Many computer systems are configured with low screen resolutions from the dealer. To get maximum use from The Civil War CD-ROM, set your screen resolution to the highest possible setting that is comfortable for you.
When searching for phrases, put the search in quotes. For example, "FORT BUTLER" and not FORT BUTLER. Selecting Simple query will do this automatically, so you need to use it only when performing a Complex search with ANDs and ORs, etc.
The left and right portions of the window can be adjusted by grabbing the center bar with the mouse (click the left button) and moving it left or right
A 'topic' is a single scrolling region of text, such as a single report. Everything displayed will appear as a topic.
The upper left hand window contains a high level index to all of the books on the disc. To see all of the topics in a book, click on it once
The lower left hand window contains topic references, indexed by a brief description. Double click on a description to bring up the full document
To jump to a given page # for the book of the currently selected topic, enter '#pagenum' (e.g. #514) as a Query and press the Qry button
To jump to a given page # for any book on the CDROM, enter, as a Query, 'arNNN_pagenum' for the Army OR (e.g. first book of Gettysburg, #43, page 310, would be 'ar43_310'). Use 'dy' rather than 'ar' for Dyer's, 'fx' for Fox, 'ug' for the User's Guide, 'giN' for the Guide Index, N=volume #.
You can create your own research bookmarks using the Bookmarking feature, which permits nested folders of marks. To bookmark a single topic, press the [Mark] button when the topic is displayed. To bookmark all of the topics in the lower left window, press the [Copy to bookmarks] button, which will copy them to a new folder for you.
You can create different bookmark files, say, for given research projects
You can share your bookmarks with someone else using The Civil War CD-ROM. It's easy to export any of your marks to a file that can be sent and imported by your fellow researcher
To see a footnote reference, click on it and it will appear immediately in a popup window
Try the National Archives Guide Index, a high level index to the Official Records with thousands of hypertext links to the referenced documents
Read up on the history and use of the Official Records with The User's Guide to the Official Records
You can search only a subset of the material by opening the Bookmark box and either selecting a number of books or a folder containing the topics to be searched
