2.3 Finding content

Learn to

• Search the repository.
• Browse the repository.
• Sort by various criteria.
• Discover quality content in other ways.

Searching the content repository

You can search the content repository for a specific module or a collection using the Search button and text box in the upper right of the Connexions web pages. Type in a name, keyword,collection title, module title, text string, or object ID in the Search text box and click Search . Connexions will display a list of all modules and collections that match your entry. You can sort and filter these results by various criteria. To view a module or collection, click its title.

Browsing the content repository

Select the Content tab (above the You are here Breadcrumb bar) to display thebrowsing interface screen. This page also allows you to search for modules or collections by title, author name, or subject area.

Or you can use the Connexions Browse feature to display a listing of all content by subject, title, author name, keyword, popularity, language or revision date.

1. Browse by selecting the appropriate item under the Browse All Content heading on the tab. (The last filter criterion, "All Collections", will display a listing of only collections instead of searching individual modules.)
2. Refine your results. The refinement differs depending on what you chose to browse by in Step 1.
3. View a module or collection by clicking on its title.

On the right side of the browsing interface screen is the Repository portal. Use this to jump to a random module or random collection in the repository.

Sorting criteria

There are several pages on Connexions where you might see a list of content like those shown below. Some of the pages are the results of searching or browsing Connexions, but you will also see these lists through lens pages , author profiles , and elsewhere. This interface allows you to choose multiple views of the content listings, sort them by various criteria, and even quickly checkout or derive a copy of content to one of your Work Areas .

A typical listing is shown below . Notice the left side includes basic metadata like the title, author, summary, etc. and the right side includes further metadata which you can sort by .

Sort by

• Relevance - to what you searched by
• Popularity - based on the number of times the content has been visited in ratio to the total number of page hits of all Connexions content.
• Language - as specified by the author.
• Revision date - to sort the most recently updated content to the top of the list.
• Title - to list the content alphabetically
• Type - to group collections together at the top, and modules together at the bottom.

Views

Finally, the statistics view gives you a bit more information behind Connexions "Popularity" ranking. You can see the total number of times the content has been viewed, the average number of views/day, how high the content is ranked (a rank of "1" means that content is the most-viewed content in the Connexions repository), and the rank percentile (a percentile of 98.72% means that 98.72% of the content in the repository is ranked lower than the this content).

At the top of the statistics view are links that allow you to download a spreadsheet of the statistics, either for the past week or for all time.

Discovering content

If you are looking for quality content on a certain subject, or tailored for a certain audience, there are other ways to find what you are looking for.

Through content

Through lenses

You can always browse our list of public Lenses to find lenses related to the subject you are searching.

Through member profiles

In this figure , a link (view statistics) is circled in red. Click this to go directly to the popularity statistics of this author's content. Rank them by popularity to find the content by this author most visited.