FoundIt Tour: A Worked Example of Scope, Tags and Clips

Edited by Ellis Vey. Updated 6 November 2026.

A useful retrieval walkthrough needs a collection, a question and an answer that can be checked. This guide provides all three. The historical mechanisms come first; the complete teaching collection that follows is newly invented.

Five records, one misplaced memory

Every filename, project, tag and passage below is invented for this guide. The labels are a paper model for comparing retrieval routes; they are not undocumented FoundIt search syntax.

A — river-sketch.pdf

Project: River. Tag: field-study. Passage: “Three stones mark the east-bank crossing.”

B — river-budget.xls

Project: River. Tag: planning. Passage: “Allow two survey days before the bridge workshop.”

C — river-notes.txt

Project: River. Tag: field-study. Passage: “The east-bank crossing needs a second visit after rain.”

D — museum-plan.pdf

Project: Museum. Tag: planning. Passage: “Place the ticket desk beside the west entrance.”

E — invoice-email.eml

Project: Studio. Tag: admin. Passage: “Payment covers one month of studio rent.”

Step 1: test the remembered format

The task is to recover the caution about the river crossing for a workshop brief. You remember seeing it in a PDF. The PDF subset is A and D. D concerns the museum entrance; A concerns the crossing but contains no caution about rain. The first clue has produced a plausible document without producing the wanted passage.

This is a meaningful failure state. Saying “two results” is insufficient: the reader must also know that three records lie outside the current subset. A narrow result list does not prove that the collection lacks the information.

Step 2: change the retrieval question

Set the format clue aside. The project label River retrieves A, B and C, crossing PDF, spreadsheet and text formats. Read those three passages: B supplies a budget assumption, A identifies the crossing and C supplies the rain condition. C answers the question even though its format conflicts with the initial memory.

For comparison, the independent tag field-study retrieves A and C; planning retrieves B and D. Project and activity are different relationships. A planning label is too broad for the crossing question because it also brings in museum work. These are set comparisons within the teaching data, not a claim about combining original FoundIt controls.

Step 3: carry the condition into the clip

Copying only “a second visit” would lose both the location and the reason. Our paper clip therefore keeps the complete passage and adds a short explanation:

The east-bank crossing needs a second visit after rain.

Source

C — river-notes.txt

Context

River project; field-study tag

Reason for keeping it

Preserve the rain condition when planning the next site visit.

This clip record is an editorial proposal. It shows what context a reusable excerpt needs; it does not assert that FoundIt automatically stored these fields. Reading the brief later, someone can identify the source, recover the condition and distinguish it from B’s separate budget assumption.

What the worked example establishes

The PDF route returned a related file and still missed the answer. The River route recovered the relevant text record. The clip then preserved a condition that careless shortening would remove. Those outcomes follow from the fully listed sample data; no user study is needed to verify the set membership.

A real evaluation would add a different question: can people recognise the current scope and make that recovery unaided? Compare the role-based questions in ArchChive and the audience-and-stage grouping example in information design.