Search from hierarchy — you can select particular administrative units when you enter a place name into the autocomplete-field.
Select from hierarchy — the Estonian territory has been divided into periods. The administrative division of a respective time branches out from under each period. When you click on the [+] sign, you can open the tree structure or smaller units of administrative division, e.g. a governorate (guberniya) subdivides into counties, acounty into parishes, these in their turn subdivide into manors and rural municipalities (civil parishes). The smallest units (villages, farmsteads) should be searched under the respective manor or by title.
The search field Title enables to search for a map according to the words occuring in the original title of the map. You can enter random words and phrases into the field, also place names (including the names of farmsteads). You have to keep in mind that the place names may not occur in contemporary ortography, also, a large part of the maps are in German or in Russian, thus different variants should be experimented in the search field. The German names of manors can be found in VAU, the register of estates on the Estonian territory.
Archive. You can choose the archival institution from the drop down menu among which maps you would like to search.
Reference code is the archival reference (fond–inventory–item), i.e. the data necessary for finding, managing and referring to a record. It is not required to enter a page number. Many maps consist of one page, but in case of a set of maps on several pages, all the map sheets belonging to this set will be displayed.
Alternative ID is a search field for searching by all other reference codes which are not fond–inventory–item.
The search field Creator allows to search for maps by the names of the land surveyors and cartographers connected with the creation of the maps. Since the spelling of names may vary in the original, there is the autocomplete–field which offers possible name equivalents to facilitate the search.
The search field Thematic maps enables to select thematic and special-purpose maps. General geographic maps, topographic maps and cadastral maps do not belong under thematic and special-purpose maps as a rule.
Format is the correspondence of the measurements of a map to the "A format" series of paper sizes (ISO 216).
You can search for maps by the date of creation of the document. For this you should enter the beginning and ending years of the selected period.
Relative scale allows to search for the maps with the desired relative scale, for instance if you enter from 4000 until 4000 then all maps with the relative scale 1:4000 will be displayed.