Conquering Concordance

Q: The document does not change in Opticon/Concordance Image when I move to another record in Concordance.

A: Make sure that the "view document" button in Concordance, the one with the camera icon, is depressed. If the button is not depressed, the Opticon window will not refresh when you move from one record to another in Concordance.

Q: Whenever I move to a new document, I loose my zoom and orientation settings in Opticon/Concordance Image. This is particularly annoying when I have many documents with small text or which are in landscape view. Is there a way for me to keep my zoom and orientation settings when moving from document to document?

Yes, there is. Go to "Tools", select "Preferences", and in the "General" tab, mark the checkbox labeled "Sticky Zoom" and click on "OK" (Alt+T,F,Z,Enter).

Q: I can't enter any data! All my fields are gray! What do I do?

A: When someone is working in a record, that record is locked so that two people do not edit the record at the same time. Make sure that no one else is working on the same record.

Q: My changes are not being saved! -or- Q: My changes were erased/lost!

A: Most likely you have accidentally cleared your entries with the "undo" function. If you lost your connection to the network you may have lost a few changes, although this is rare and easily rectified by exiting and reopening Concordance. If tags are not being saved, make sure that you are using the newest version of Concordance with all the patches AND that you do not have more users than you have licenses for trying to access the database.

Q. Is there an easy way to view Concordance and Opticon/Concordance Image side by side without having to manually resize and position the windows of each program?

A: Yes, but not from within the programs themselves. If they are the only two programs open, you can use the tile function of MS Windows to tile the windows vertically. To do this, right click on a blank area of the Windows Task Bar and click on "Tile Windows Vertically". An even better option, however, is to have two monitors. Maximize Concordance in one screen and maximize Opticon in the other.

One of the most effect ways to increase your review rate in Concordance is to avoid using the mouse as much as possible. Take a little extra time in the beginning to learn the keyboard shortcuts.

If you are already comfortable with the keyboard shortcuts, you probably have no reason to be concerned about your speed. Remember that accuracy of review is as important as rate of review. Although coding errors are unacceptable in either paper or electronic review, they can be especially problematic in electronic review where you can code a great number of documents before you realize your mistake.

If you are left-handed, setting the mouse for left-handed use may help speed up your coding when using the mouse is unavoidable, such as when selecting multiple items from an authority list. You can access your mouse settings in the Windows "Control Panel."

Some people find that changing the speed and sensitivity settings of their mouse and keyboard helps prevent typos and unintended mouse selections.

For a list of keyboard shortcuts, see: http://www.squidoo.com/Concordance-Shortcuts

You can not copy Concordance files while they are in use. You can, however, export the text data in a delineated text file, even when people are working in the database.

Should you need to, you can easily recover the data by recreating the shell (database structure without, the fields, without any data) and import the data from the delineated text file.

Having the data backed up in delineated text files is also helpful in recovering should the database files become corrupt.

The steps to perform an export to delineated text are as follows:

1. Make sure you have opened the database you want to export data from.
2. From the "Documents" menu, select "Export."
   
3. Choose "Deliminated Text"
   
4. Choose "Export Dialog Box"
   
5. Select All
   
6. Range should be for entire record range
   
7. Comma = pipe "| (124)" or another symbol that is not found in the data you are exporting.
   
8. Quote = carrot "^ (094)" or another symbol that is not found in the data you are exporting.
   
9. Newline = doesn't matter, leave as is.
   
10. Date format = "mm/dd/yyyy"
    
11. Check "Export field names as first record."
12. Click "GO"
    
13. Navigate to location you want the data exported to, enter a file name, and click "OK"
    

You can also backup by exporting to a new Concordance database. This will also back up your tags. The advantage of the text backup is that is helps preserve your data even if there is an error on a text file or database corruption. Also, it results in smaller files sizes and a single backup file. To further keep the files sizes of your backups down, just backup those fields that users are editing. Generally, you don't need to back up fields like the OCR fields. DO, however, backup the BEGDOC or other control number fields so that you can run overlays should you need to.

Four Times When You Should Perform a Full Index

1. New Database
   
2. If you modify a database.
   
3. If you edit the stop word list.
   
4. When a file gets corrupted
   

Tips to Improve Indexing Speed and Performance

1. Perform indexing locally. E.g. log into the server locally via VPN or Terminal Services if the database resides on a server.
   
2. Break large databases into smaller databases and concatenate them. That way reviewers are only working on pieces of the database at one time. If possible, have the reveiwers work with a database unconcatenated so you can index the other databases not being worked on.
   
3. Check the memory settings under Tools-->Preferences-->Indexing. Boosting the memory settings can help.
   

REASON FOR USE:

When coding a series of documents, you find that you are duplicating much of the same information. You can use the ditto function to code these documents more efficiently.

HOW TO USE

While coding, if you notice that the custodian has many of the same functions in a row, you may use the Ditto function. Use the button with the blue ditto/quotation marks; it is next to the yellow tag button.

PROCEDURE

Code as usual.

Select the fields you want to copy (If you want to select more than one field, then hold the CTRL button down)

Once you have made your selection select COPY PREVIOUS. It is important that you use this selection ONLY.

Do NOT use the use the APPEND NEW function or you will create a new record. This is why you have to be extremely careful because you have to pay attention or there will be a lot of new records in the database.

Select "OK"

This will automatically put the selected information in their respective fields

To continue using the selected fields, CTRL+D will automatically drop the selected data into their respective fields.

If you have to make a change to the fields go back to the blue quotes and make your coding changes then continue until you need to make changes again.

Tagging documents in Concordance is simple. Because of this they are frequently abused and used in place of more appropriate tools. Advising the client to follow the following best practices will make their tagging more productive and prevent heartache in the event that you need to rebuild a database if it becomes corrupted.

1. Only use alpha-numeric characters. Punctuation and non alpha-numeric characters are not indexed by Concordance. Avoid using multiple asterisks and dashes to distinguish tabs with similar names. While this is normally not an issue for tags, it may become very important if you should have to convert the tags to a text field for export (e.g. to rebuild a corrupted database).
   
2. Try to make each tag unique, having a tag called "responsive" when that word is in numerous other tags makes searching more complicated. It also leads to confusion among reviewers.
   
3. Prefix every tag with a number. Use this to organize tags non-alphabetically, rather than using asterisks, dashes, and other symbols to bring specific tags to the top of the list.
   
4. Use SavedSearches rather than tags to keep track of query results. Teach reviewers to save searches and create saved search files in plain text documents that can be loaded at any time in the future. Often reviewers use tags to mark the results of a search. This is not a proper use of tags. You can often greatly reduce the number of tags in a database by using saved searches instead of tagging the results of queries. Fewer tags makes for a less cluttered, less confusing, and more productive work environment.

DBA File Size: up to 9,223 PB
This is not a practical number due to IVT file limit, The IVT file can only grow to 0.5 TB This limits the practical Concordance database size to between 256 and 512 GB.

Pages per record: 1,875,000 Records per database: 33 million

Field Limiations: Each Field: up to 250 fields per database.

• Paragraph: 12 MB (7,500 pages). If the data exceeds 12 MB, Concordance will overflow it to next field(assuming one has been created). Therefore, it is good practice to have at least two OCR paragraph fields, one after the other.
  
• Date: 8 bytes
  
• Numeric: 20 characters
  
• Text: 60 characters
  

Concatenation Limits: Version 7 can only join 16 databases in a Concatenation. Versions EX and 8 can concatenate 128 databases.

You can create more screen space in the editing window, to see more fields on one screen by doing the following:

1. Hide tool bar text by going to "Tools", then "Toolbars" and deselecting "Toolbar Text" or type the following key combination: Alt+T, T, O.
   
2. Hide the Quick Search Toolbar, by going to "Tools", then "Toolbars", and deselecting "Quick Search Toolbar" or type the following key combination: ALT+T, T, Q.
   
3. Hide the Format toolbar by undocking it, right-click on the title (the word "Format") and select "hide".
   
4. Hide the windows task bar (which is the bar typically at the bottom of your screen that shows what applications are running and what documents are open), by doing the following:
   
   • Right-click on any empty space on the task bar and select "Properties" or click the START button on the left side of the task bar, then settings, then "Task Bar & Start Menu".
     
   • Select "Auto hide".
     
   
   
5. In Concordance 2007, auto-hide the navigation pane by clicking on the small, auto-hide button in the upper right corner of the pane (it looks like a tack).
   

If you open an Opticon load file in a text editor, you will see textual content delimited by commas (","), from left to right they are:

IMAGEKEY?, VOLUME NAME, FULL PATH TO IMAGE, IMAGE TYPE, DOC BREAK? (="y"), FOLDER BREAK?, BOX BREAK?, NUMBER OF PAGES IN DOCUMENT

Volume name is not required, but must have comma (blank fields are two consequtive commas with no other text in between, e.g. ",,").