If you are interested in what was said or done in the legislative process regarding particular issues, or about particular words or phrases, you can easily search within our compiled legislative history for specific terms. Using Boolean search logic, you can use the search box at the top of a history to search within all the attached PDF documents. Type your terms in "Find terms in full text publications:"- you can use connectors such as AND, OR, NOT and NEAR/x, and you can use double-quotes to find a specific phrase.
Once you have done this search, the documents that have your search hits in the attached PDF will be highlighted with a gold box around the download link. You can filter the view of the page to only show those documents. You cant tell how many hits are in each document, or see where they are or get a preview- that is what we will be using Adobe for.
Once you have identified the documents that you will be searching and reading, you can download them manually, one at a time, to a location on your computer or network. It will help the next search step if you create a new separate folder for any and all PDFs from your search results. There is no batch functionality in Legislative Insight to download multiple PDFs. (However, there is a browser plug-in for Firefox called Zotero that can automate this process, if you use the Firefox browser.
Now we have a folder of exported documents, all of which have our search terms which we identified in step 1. Now we want to see how many, where, and in what context they appear, so we are going to do a "batch" search all at once in Adobe Reader or Acrobat to see that information. Unbeknownst to many of us Adobe even allows us to do proximity searching- if you search terms in proximity to each other in Legislative Insight, now you can find those hits in our PDF's easily.
Tips for batch searching in Adobe