Frequently Asked Questions

Found Volumes, developed by Peter and Laurie Tosto, is the original easy-to-use computerized index to the Christian Science periodicals used at The Mother Church and branch churches, reading rooms, care facilities, and by individuals all over the world. Included with the software is a permanent index to over 90,000 articles dating back to 1883. Found Volumes Online is the web companion to Found Volumes, offering the ability to search the periodicals from the Internet.

Existing Found Volumes customers can use our Site Registration page to subscribe to the Online service. If you don’t already have Found Volumes, please visit www.FoundVolumes.com to learn about purchasing. Your first year of Online access will be free!

The Search facility (see top right corner of the screen) will individually compare every space-separated element of the search phrase with just the article’s title and author. Note that the order of the text entries in the search phrase (whether full or partial words are used) is not significant.

The Advanced Search menu option (on the left of the screen) takes you to a page where you can further refine your search criteria by specifying a Year of Publication, a Category and/or type of periodical (Journal or Sentinel). Please note the following:

• If you enter in a non-numeric or invalid year, then you will find you have no matching records when you click the “Find” button.
• You can enter partial words at either the ‘Title’ or ‘Author’ text prompts. The order of these words must match the order of their appearance in their respective data items for the article to appear in the list of search results.
• You can match across multiple categories by holding down the <Ctrl> key on your keyboard when you make your selections from the Categories list.

When looking for articles, whether via Search or Advanced Search, you need to recheck the accuracy (e.g., spelling) of your search criteria. In Advanced Search, it may be possible that you have put the query word in the title field when you meant the author field or vice versa.

Also, if you enter a name, e.g., Mary Baker Eddy, but there is an article where her name was listed as only Mary B. Eddy, as was the case with some of her early articles, a few of her articles would not be listed. It is important to keep in mind that an article must contain your query exactly. Some authors changed the way they signed their names over the years, using initials or not, changing from maiden to married names, etc. Sometimes it takes a little experimenting to locate all of an author’s articles.

Also note that:

• Case (upper or lower) of the phrase you are searching for is not significant to the matching of articles.
• You may type multiple words in your search phrase. The search will return articles in which all the words appear somewhere in the title or author name. Each word of the search phrase is matched independently of all other words (so, if your search includes two words, the search may find an article where one word appears in the title and the other appears in the author).
• Your search is matched character for character, so, for example, a search for "land" will match articles containing "land", "landscape", as well as "Roland", "slander" and "England".
• Punctuation marks (e.g., question mark, quotation mark, etc.) are searchable. For example, you can search for "feed to find articles that have a quotation followed by the word "feed" as in "feed my sheep".

No. Found Volumes Online is an index only. To read the articles, you need to refer to the back issues of the magazines.

Many newer web browsers offer a page zoom feature. Try pressing <Ctrl> and the + key one or more times to increase magnification to a comfortable size. Pressing <Ctrl> and the - key will reduce size again.

Alternatively, you can click the SIZE arrow button on the right side of the page which will refresh the page with larger fonts. Clicking this button again (now showing a down arrow to indicate a reduction in size) will return you to the smaller screen format.

Narrow your search as much as possible by adding search words so that only articles you are interested in are being displayed. Then click the printer icon near the upper right hand corner of the screen. This gives a you a printer-friendly listing that removes all the menu details and displays the article query results in a larger font. Finally, choose Print from the File menu in your browser.

You are either logged in as a demo user, or your yearly registration has expired. In either instance, you will need to pay the current registration fee to be able to view all the article details.

Please note that the demo login is provided as a suitability check prior to registration, enabling you to try out the full functionality of the site without financial commitment. In this mode you have limited data viewing. Once you have registered, you will have full search capabilities.

The number of articles that will be displayed per page is determined by the number in the Show box. This number can be changed to any number from 10-100 (with 25 as the default) to suit your screen or printer size simply by entering the new number and hitting the enter key.

All the results can be sorted by any one column simply by clicking on the title name of that column. If the sort order is in ascending order, then clicking on it again will display the articles in descending order.

Testimonies before 1999 are not included in Found Volumes Online because they were not given titles. In the current periodicals there is a caption above each testimony, which makes it relevant to search.

No. The numbers in parentheses show the number of articles that can be accurately placed in a specific category since the very first publication. Note that these days, articles in a series or category are more readily identifiable (for instance, “Teen Talk”), whereas in the past this hasn’t been the case. It’s only where they are specifically identifiable by title or author (historically) or have identifying captions/labels (1990’s onward) that they have been categorized. Note that, due to the volume of articles that have been published, automation of titles via scanning has been the focus, not the visual viewing of individual content to identify their categorization. This means there may be more articles in any given category.

The numbers in parentheses show the number of articles that can be accurately placed in a specific category since the very first publication. There may be more articles in any given category that are not readily identifiable so are not included in the category section and number count.

Next to every article that is listed there appears a button that allows you to view more information about the current article. That information includes an “Article Key” value, which uniquely identifies the article within the site’s database. Take a note of this number - you can enter it on the feedback form with details of the error (spelling mistake, incorrect page number, wrong classification, etc.) so the specific article concerned can be very easily identified and corrected.