Search Tips

Our archive contains a whole range of resources drawn from 25 years of work. You’ll find everything from academic papers to audio clips, our in-house magazine – SourceNW, strategic documents, specially written project case studies and government publications.

We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to navigate through the archive. The Collections have been put together to offer you a taste of what’s available, and to guide you through the basics of the Mersey Basin Campaign.

If you’d rather just dive into the archive and try your luck, there are a number of ways to approach your search:

By year – if you know roughly when the item you’re after was produced, try searching by year.

By region – if the item you want is related to a specific region, river or catchment, search by region to locate it.

By theme – We’ve split our resources in to five themes, if you’re looking for a specific type of material, that might be a useful way to search:

1. Practical items are usually those which will tell you how something was done, or talk about a specific on-the-ground project.
2. Academic resources are usually research papers or journal articles – these will be in-depth studies on a particular issue.
3. Strategic documents are broadly non-practical documents, produced by the Mersey Basin Campaign or others for strategic reasons. For example, items in this section might include publicity material, plans, or information about partnership, governance or organisational structure.
4. Facts and figures – as the name suggests, these items will provide factual information about the Campaign’s work and related issues.
5. Personal reflections usually focus on an individual’s experience of the Campaign or its work.

Search tags:

If that’s not enough for you, we’ve also labelled every item in the archive with search tags giving a clue to the contents of that resource. You can see the full list of tags HERE. Click on any tag to see a list of all the items attached to it.

Keywords:

If you don’t see what you need here, try typing any keyword into the SEARCH BOX – this will look through all the information we have about an item (title, author details, abstract etc), and bring you a list of everything in the archive which might be relevant. The site uses Google search technology, so you can use it just as you would Google.

Sample searches:

To get started, why not try searching for source? This should bring back everything related to our magazine, SourceNW.
To be more specific, you might want to enter something like source manchester, which will find everything related to both Source and Manchester.