Frequently Asked Questions:

I have searched for a well known reader/ author/ title in RED, but the only results that appear are for the UK RED database - why are there no results for the other countries?

RED was launched very recently, in February 2011. Although the UK RED project has been up and running for several years, other nations have only begun to collect data very recently and it will take some time for their collections to develop. To find out more about the data being collected at the national level, please go to the relevant national website by clicking on the logo on the left hand side of the page.

I have clicked on a RED partner logo, but they don't seem to have a database?

The template and database structure for national REDs connected to the Reading Experience Database (RED) was only delivered to partners at the beginning of 2011. Tweaks based on national pecularities need to be made to the data structure for each country before their databases can be officially launched. This means that some national REDs will come on stream before others. Please bear with us during this process, and we thank you in advance for your patience.

Why can I only search by author, reader or text? Why can’t I search by place, or genre, or gender?

At the moment, in order to facilitate fast and efficient basic searching across all of the national databases, the search function offers the three most relevant general search functions only. You will be able to undertake more advanced searching, including searches by place, genre, or gender, in the individual national RED databases.

Why can I only search by one term? Why can’t I combine search terms?

At the moment, in order to facilitate fast and efficient basic searching across all of the national databases, the search function offers the three most relevant general search functions only. You will be able to undertake more advanced searches (with combined search terms) in the individual national RED databases.

I have tried a title search, but haven’t received the search results I have expected. Why is this so?

There may be variations in how titles have been published, translated, or recorded in different countries and in different times in history, and this will be evident in a database project such as ours, that covers a long historical timespan and geographical scope. If your first search for a specific title doesn’t return the expected results, you might want to try again with variant spellings, or with/without definite/indefinite articles (‘The’/’A’) in the title.

Why do I only see up to five entries from each database? Aren’t there more entries?

The RED search is designed to bring up the first five entries from each of the national databases (where such relevant entries exist). This is designed to give you a ‘sample’ of the data available – there may well be many more than five entries per database, and the total number of relevant hits from your search is displayed above the results and just below the world map. You can click on each entry which will take you to the record housed in the relevant national database.

There is a French flag at the top of the webpage, but I can’t switch to a French language interface – why is this so?

We intend to develop and make available the search interface (but not translations of the individual data records) in French in the future, but this function is not operable as yet.

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