This help page is divided into the following sections:

About the collection
Finding documents
What is a search engine, and how does ours work?
What is browsing?
Understanding the results page
Choosing a format to download

If you don't find an answer to your question here, please contact us.

About the collection

The Capacity 21 Resource Library collection contains documents created by Capacity 21 or in the course of Capacity 21-supported programmes. The collection is a learning resource and tool for a broad audience interested in Agenda 21 and sustainable development, including policy makers, sustainable development practitioners, and students.

Documents range from formal publications -- Capacity 21 Annual Reports -- to meeting notes and briefing papers that stand as records of the kinds of the processes and decisions required to implement Agenda 21 on local, national, and international levels. Documents may appear in multiple formats, and will soon be translated into three languages: English, French, and Spanish. The Capacity 21 Resource library contains approximately 300 documents.
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Finding documents

The two main ways to find documents in the library are to search and to browse. You can search the library by typing one or more keywords in the search box. You can also limit your search to documents related to a particular country or region; or retrieve documents of a chosen type or format. (See the Help section on document types for more on this topic). You can also limit your search to documents created in a certain year, or range of years.

It is a good idea to start out with a keyword search, and then limit it if you find that too many documents are retrieved. All of these search options are visible from the library's search page.

Browsing allows you to view the contents of the collection without choosing a keyword. It is useful if you are not sure what you want, or if you want to learn the library's category structure. You can see the number of documents there are in each category. If there are many documents in a category, try a keyword search limited to documents in the category. If there are only a few documents, try browsing through them to find what you want.

You can browse the collection by country/region, document type or format. You can also view the documents in our special collections - themed series of publications or documents. Currently we have four special collections: the Approaches to Sustainability Series, Capacity 21 Management Committee Meeting notes, the Road From Rio Series, and documents related to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). You can view all of these collections on the library's browse page.
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What is a search engine, and how does ours work?

A search engine is a software application that searches through documents to decide which ones are relevant to your search. We use a search engine called Verity, because it is bundled with our scripting language, ColdFusion.

How does our search engine work?
If you understand how a given search engine works, you will be able contour your searches more effectively. By default, our search engine does the following:

AND search:
The search engine only returns documents that contain all of the keywords you provided. This is called an implicit AND search, because the search engine assumes your search is in the form: keyword1 AND keyword2 AND keyword3, etc.

Stemming:
The search engine looks for various forms of the keywords you provided. For example, if you give 'sustainable' as a keyword, it will also return documents that contain 'sustainability' and 'sustain.'

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What is browsing?

Browsing lets you view the contents of the library without actually typing a keyword. It is a good way to locate documents when you are not sure what you want, or when you want to learn about the library's category structure and contents. Browsing is described further in the preceding Help topic, Finding documents. Visit our browse page to try it out!
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Understanding the Results page

The results page has two major sections: a search summary, and a list of documents that match your search. Your most recent search is summarized in the blue box at the top of the results page. If you want to change your search, click 'modify this search' (or select 'Search' in the horizontal menu bar at the top).

Below the search summary, a list of relevant documents is displayed. Click the title of any document in the list to read more about it before you decide to download it.

What if there are no documents in the results list?
This means that no documents in our collection matched your search - but it might not mean that there are no documents in our collection that are of interest to you. Try broadening your search by taking out some keywords, or selecting from a broader set of categories in the checkbox lists.

You may also consider browsing the collection, rather than doing keyword searches. Read more about ways to modify your search under the topic Finding documents.
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Choosing a format to download

Documents in our collection may exist in multiple formats. For example, a text document may be stored in HTML, Microsoft Word, and Portable Document Format (PDF). When you have multiple formats to choose from, how do you choose the best one?

Smaller files will download more quickly. We've listed the file sizes for each format in which a document is available, so that you can consider this factor.

Here are a few other considerations:

HTML
When you download a document in HTML format, it will appear directly in your browser. This can be convenient, as you don't need to save it or open another application to view it. However, formatting in HTML is often limited, and it can be more difficult to include charts, images, and tables.

Microsoft Word
MS Word documents require that you have the MS Word application (or a compatible word processor, like Star Office) installed on your machine. Once you download and open a Word document, it is easy to edit it and save your changes. The appearance of a Word document may vary in different versions of MS Word.

Portable Document Format (PDF)
To view PDF files you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader, a free document viewer available on the Internet from Adobe. There are versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader for most operating systems.

PDF format is popular because it preserves formatting across operating systems and versions of the viewer (unlike MS Word, see above), and doesn't require a word processor to view. However, PDF documents cannot be edited or changed in any way; they are strictly for viewing and printing.