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There are two ways to find information in HRVH Historical Newspapers, searching and browsing. Searching lets you enter a term and retrieves articles that contain that term. Browsing lets you look at all the newspapers, starting with a year, a county, or a newspaper title. All the newspaper titles on the site can be searched and browsed independently or together in one search.
Each newspaper in HRVH Historical Newspapers will have its own page containing information about the publication, including the date range that is available online and information about the history of the newspaper. The Browse by title page lists the newspapers that are available online, currently the Kingston Daily Freeman.
Use the Browse by date page to find titles published on a certain date. Select a year from the drop-down list, then click on the month you're interested in, and then on the day. A list of the newspaper titles available on this day appears, and you can click on the title you would like to look at. If there are no newspapers available for a month or day, they will not be clickable.
Use the Browse by region page to see which newspapers are available for the places you are interested in. There is a map on the page, which you can click on to see the newspaper titles available for that region. The page also shows newspaper titles with national coverage.
Each newspaper title was originally published as a series of newspaper issues. Each issue is made up of several newspaper pages. You can view all the newspaper issues and pages in HRVH Historical Newspapers. The newspapers in HRVH Historical Newspapers have their pages divided up into three categories: Articles, Advertisements, Illustrations. Every issue has a Contents list that gives you direct access to the content type or the title of the article.
HRVH Historical Newspapers provides copies of the newspaper issues and newspaper pages in Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) format that are easy to print. The PDF files are generated automatically at the time you request them, so they can take a long time to generate, especially for newspaper issues with many pages.
You can perform a simple search by typing keywords in the search box at the top of the screen and clicking [GO]. The search engine will find any records that include all of your search terms.
You can search for an exact phrase by placing quotation marks around your search terms, for example "new plymouth".
You can use Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to refine your search results. AND (include all of the words) and NOT (without the words) narrow your search; OR (with at least one of the words) broadens your s earch. For example, plymouth NOT new will retrieve articles about Plymouth but not New Plymouth.
The Advanced search screen allows you to limit your search results in a variety of ways. It also allows you to specify how you would like your search results sorted and whether you would like preview images displayed in your search results, as well as choose the number of search results that you want to display on each page.
You can limit your search to:
One or more newspaper titles
A date range
A content type (such as Shipping information or Advertisements)
As a default the search engine will look for results that exactly match your search term/s.
If you do not get many results, you may choose to do a fuzzy search instead. Fuzzy searching will find a word even if it is misspelled. It can be very useful when searching text generated using OCR software, as there are varying levels of accuracy depending on the quality of the original newspaper or microfilm. For example, a fuzzy search for Christchurch will find Ohistohurch (a surprisingly common OCR mistake).
We offer two levels of "fuzziness" — close match (slightly fuzzy) and inexact match (rather fuzzy).
Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is a process by which software reads a page image and translates it into a text file by recognizing the shapes of the letters (The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials).
The searchable newspaper text in this collection has been automatically generated using OCR software. It has not been manually reviewed or corrected.
To look at the OCR text for an article, click on the Show computer-generated text of this article link on the Article page.
OCR enables searching of large quantities of full-text data, but it is never 100% accurate. The level of accuracy depends on the print quality of the original newspaper, its condition at the time of microfilming, and the level of detail captured by the microfilm scanner. Newspapers with poor quality paper, small print, mixed fonts, multiple column layouts, or damaged pages may have poor OCR accuracy.
The OCR text contains an estimated OCR accuracy for the page on which the article appears.
Operators during the OCR process have assigned damage codes to poor quality images. When available, these are displayed along with the computer-generated text of an article to account for low OCR accuracy.
The page numbers that display on the screen have been taken from the printed pages and therefore may reflect errors in the original text.
Newspaper articles can be printed directly from your web browser.
We have supplied PDF versions of newspaper issues and newspaper pages so these can be printed more easily.
In general, you only need a common web browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer to search and browse this prototype.
Printable copies of newspaper issues and pages are provided in Adobe PDF format. You will need a PDF viewer like Adobe Acrobat to view or print these files.
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HRVH Historical Newspapers is administered by the
Southeastern New York Library Resources Council © Copyright 2009 Southeastern New York Library Resources Council |
This website was supported in part by Federal Library Services and Technology Act funds, awarded to the New York State Library by the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. |