Website FAQ

1. What is the difference between ‘search’ and ‘browse’?
2. How do I use ‘search all documents’?
3. What is ‘browse’ and how does it work?
4. How do I use ‘browse by contributor’?
5. How do I use ’search by the name of a patient’?
6. How do I use ‘browse by investigation‘?
7. How does ‘browse’ find the relevant documents?
8. How do I search everything?
9. I used ‘search by the name of a patient’ but didn’t get any document results. Why?
10. Why can’t I find the material I expected to find?
11. Why has some material not been disclosed on this site?
12. What is a redacted document and why have documents been redacted?
13. What is OCR and how is it used on the site?
14. How do I use Adobe Reader to search within documents?

13. What is OCR and how is it used on the site?

As part of the process of scanning documents in order to make them available on this website, we used optical character recognition (OCR) software to ‘read’ words on the scanned pages and create a version of the document in text file format.

This OCR information is used to help find documents when conducting searches and when building the lists of documents returned by some of the browsing methods.

While the website is not solely dependent on OCR software to find words and phrases, documents are less likely to appear if the OCR software was unable to recognise the relevant word or phrase. For example, this may happen if the original document was handwritten, or in poor condition.