The published volumes that supply the content of Founders Online all contain indexes that provide references to hundreds of names, places, and terms, keyed to page numbers. We are not yet able to integrate the content of most of those indexes into Founders Online, because a given page number may point to more than one document. We intend in a future release of Founders Online to provide a means of leveraging index content without returning “false positives”—i.e., links from index terms to documents that are not relevant.

However, because The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series began in a digital environment, we are already able to make full use of the indexes to their volumes. From the beginning of their project, PTJRS editors and staff added index entries to the XML content of each document in their database. As a result, we can extend the Founders Online search to include matches on those entries.

When you perform a search in Founders Online that matches a document by index entry instead of document text, that will be indicated in the search result set. When you view one of the result documents, all index entries for it that match your search are listed at the bottom of the document. Next to each item in the list is a search link that allows you to search for all documents in Founders Online that match the same index entry.