Thursday, November 7, 2013

Over 5,000 Databases Added to Mocavo in Past 5 Days, and Dataset Title Search Tool

I received an email from Mocavo today noting that they have added over 5,000 datasets in the past five days, including over 300 indexes from several states.  They currently have over 130,000 datasets available; most of them are relatively small datasets, but there are some large ones also (e.g., Social Security Death Index, Find A Grave, etc.).  The list of all datasets is at http://www.mocavo.com/records/all.

I posted a series about Mocavo in October, detailing that a registered user can search Mocavo for free, but it's a bit time consuming to do so because you have to search one dataset at a time.  A subscriber to Mocavo can search all datasets at one time.  See Searching on Mocavo.com Using a Mocavo Gold Account for links to the series of posts.

The list of datasets added in the past five days is here.  The top of the list looked like this:


There were 5,457 datasets added in the last five days.  There is a list of Categories on the left-hand side of the screen.  I clicked on the "BMD" category and the list of 493 datasets added in the past five days were listed:


There is an interesting set of radio buttons on the search box at the top of the screen, and at the top of the All Datasets screen.  There are three radio buttons:

*  Search within these datasets (meaning the last five days in this case)
*  Search within all datasets (meaning all available datasets)
*  Search for dataset titles

The third one is very useful.  I clicked on the "Search for dataset titles" button and entered "chester" in the "Dataset Title" search field:




There were 362 datasets with "chester" in the dataset title.  There are 169 for "chester pennsylvania" in the dataset title.  There are 30 with "san diego" in the title.  There are 70 with "probate" in the title.

That is a very handy search tool to help a researcher.  My experience with Mocavo to date in searching for a person (first and last name), even with a keyword (location or year or spouse), is that I can get MANY matches in a lot of esoteric datasets for a typical name.  With this "dataset title" tool, I can look in a specific place or in a specific place and record type.

I hope that Mocavo adds this tool to the Home and Search pages to help researchers quickly see what is available in the 130,000 plus datasets.  Once they pick a specific dataset from the list available for a place, they can then search for names within that dataset and explore page by page if they desire.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/11/over-5000-databases-added-to-mocavo-in.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

Disclosure:  Mocavo provided me with a complimentary Mocavo Plus membership (now called Mocavo Gold) two years ago and I appreciate their generosity.  This has not affected my objectivity in reporting on Mocavo's capabilities and resources.

2 comments:

Geolover said...

When I search for "Title" using the keyword box, I get millions of keyword results within myriad publications regardless of title.

It would be a useful search if it consistlenty worked to retrieve titles.

Anonymous said...

My recent experience with the free version of Mocavo wouldn't lead me to purchase a subscription if for no other reason to (hopefully) avoid the incessant pop-ups asking if I want to purchase a subscription. As they have aggressively moved to a subscription model, the free version delivers less-and-less with more and more annoyance.