Barani is an interactive, searchable resource that links you to:

• Sources - references to books, films, images and websites about Sydney's Indigenous history, from earliest pre-contact traces to most recent events.
• Persons - biographies on significant Aboriginal people in Sydney
• Organisations - useful contacts for Aboriginal organisations in Sydney (particularly those related to history and culture) and explanations of historic organisations that no longer operate.
• Themes - a series of thematic introductions to Sydney's Indigenous history

The keyword search options on Barani enable you to effectively query across the information contained in all these categories. There are three ways to search Barani: Quick Search; Advanced Search; Browsing.

As the name suggests, Quick Search helps you locate the information you are after in the quickest possible manner.

Quick Search lets you search for one or more keywords across any combination of Sources, People, Organisations and Themes. The default setting is to search across all categories.

To perform a Quick Search:
1. Enter your keyword search query in the 'Search For' area (to construct an effective query see Constructing your Search Query)
2. Ensure the categories you wish to search across are selected (People, Organisations, Themes or Sources)
3. Click on the GO button or hit the 'enter' key

You will be then be presented with a screen summarising your search results.

Advanced Search enables you to further refine your search options, specifically within the Sources category. You can search within one or more source types (e.g. books, websites, films). All source types available are shown for you to select as required. Unlike the Quick Search, you do not have to enter a search term, allowing you to retrieve all source types or a combination of sources. You can also specify a date range for publication year.

To perform an Advanced Search:

1. Type in a keyword search (if required) (to construct an effective query see Constructing your Search Query)
2. Select what categories you wish to search (Sources, People, Organisations or Themes)
3. Select what source types you wish to search
4. Type in a publication range to search between (if required)
5. Click on the GO button or hit the 'enter' key

For example, you may use the Advanced Search to find Books that were published between 1950 and 1990. This is shown in the example below:

The Advanced Search still allows you to search across the other categories (People, Organisations, Themes) at the same time. For example, you may use the Advanced Search to identify books, articles, photographs, art, films and documentaries on the 1988 bicentenary, as well as other references to the bicentenary in People, Organisations and Themes. This is shown below.

If you don't have a particular keyword query, but wish to explore Barani further, it is possible to browse the categories of People, Organisations and Themes. These are presented alphabetically. (Unfortunately due to the sheer number of sources available, you are unable to browse by sources).

To browse a category, click on the hyperlink at the bottom of the search screen in either Quick Search or Advanced Search mode.

Barani Search performs an exact keyword search across the categories People, Organisations, Sources and Themes. It searches names, titles, authors, abstracts for People, Organisation and Sources and across the entire text of all themes using the search term entered.

Before you begin searching, think about your search strategy.

1. Define what you are interested in to focus your search strategy. For example: If you are interested in Aboriginal painting generally (both discussions of and examples of Aboriginal paintings), you could do a Quick Search on Painting OR Paintings (which will pick up all occurrences of either word). Alternatively you could broaden your search term and do a Quick Search on Art. If you are interested in finding examples of Aboriginal paintings, then do an Advanced Search and select the source type Art.

2. Don't start by using very specific keywords. In the example used above, Art is a broader term than Painting and will probably yield more results.

3. Think about alternative words that may have been used to describe what you are interested in. eg. schools / education; museums / galleries / cultural institutions / keeping places.

Here are some basic guidelines for search terms:

Take a moment to learn about the Boolean search terms supported in Barani Search. These can help you to refine your searches and search on multiple terms. You may use the Boolean operators OR, NOT, AND to form a more precise query.

By default Barani automatically uses the Boolean operator "AND" to find results that match all of your search terms. Therefore you do not need to explicitly type "AND" inbetween words. For example to find out about Aboriginal Music type.

This will locate information containing the terms "Aboriginal" and "Music"

To find about Policies that are not related to the Church type:

To find out about Painting or Art type:

To find out about any Art or Paintings that are Political type:

Note that in the above example brackets are used to further define the search.

You should avoid using common words in your search criteria. Using of words such as this, is, of, a will cause the entire search term to be ignored and no results displayed. If you are not getting any results in your search check that it does not contain any common words.

Common words in a phrase will not cause this problem. For example:

will retrieve items containing the entire phrase but:

will not give any results due to the common word of

Remove any common words eg. a, the, is, this, of.