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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: Erato on Monday 10 June 13 18:00 BST (UK)
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Has anybody developed an efficient way to search digitized newspaper archives? The Red Bank (New Jersey) Register has been digitized and is searchable by key word(s) but the search results only come up with a date, no page number, and the key words are not highlighted. It is necessary to load the entire newspaper (about 48 pages) which is incredibly slow and then search through it page by page. It takes hours to discover in the end that your target attended a bridge party. In effect, it is too slow and tedious to be useful, especially with a common name.
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Hi!
I don't know about that particular newspaper but I found that with big collections of digitized newspaper like Google News Archive, British Newspaper Archive, etc. typing a name does not give me the best results. I usually go to the years/location that interest me and I type an address instead... It yielded many interesting hits! Try also the name/surname reversed or first name initials. Don't forget about neighbors and try other members of the family (remember the married surname for women). This should help I hope
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Here's the link for the digitised newspapers for Australia from 1803 to more recent times. The National Library of Australia's advanced search options include selecting just one newspaper, or a number of newspapers; just a single date or a range (month/year/decade or from/to dates etc; keywords/phrases and 'without' keywords, Articles and/or advertising and/or lists and/or family notices (bdm announcements !) and number of words in the article etc.
You can even contribute to the OCR transcription that runs alongside the image; you can save the image as pdf, jpeg etc, add tags or simply take a snip of the image yourself ....
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/search?adv=y
This is a link to the free to search website funded by the National Library of Australia. The NLA is continually uploading digitised newspapers (and other holdings) to their website. I find the armchair experience a much better proposition over the searching through the original newspaper holdings in the Public Libraries. Before the web it was of course a difficult task to get to the various capital cities in the various states of Australia and access the hardcopies of the newspapers held by each of the various State based Public Libraries.
Another Antipodean link is for Papers Past, which is New Zealand's digitised newspapers. It too is quite easy to search from the armchair and without undue time spent looking at articles not relevant to your specific search. It too is a website that continues to upload newspapers as they digitise them.
http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast
You will find that the newspapers at those two links include quite a deal of "foreign" news and not just their own local news specific to the city/town/locality where they were published.
Hope this helps,
Cheers, JM (7th generation NSW, Australia centric with several generations of family from NZ as well, so I have been 'into' newspapers from around the early 1960s re my family history hobby)
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I don't know about 'efficient' but I have found that searching with a surname and a place name yields interesting results - for smaller villages I even just search by the name of the village - they are less likely to have been 'altered' by the scanning process than some to the more obscure surnames.
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Well I recently wasted c£9 and lots of credits due to not being able to sort the searching out on a British Newspaper site! I did explain this to the site, but found them far from helpful.
xin
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Well I recently wasted c£9 and lots of credits due to not being able to sort the searching out on a British Newspaper site! I did explain this to the site, but found them far from helpful.
xin
What do you mean "sort out the searching"? Do you mean the results?
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All good suggestions but what I am looking for is some way to narrow the search to a specific page or section of the newspaper. The search engine tells me that there is a mention of "Mrs. John B. Doe" in this newspaper but not where. It is therefore necessary to load and read the whole damned paper to find her. This is especially tedious in one of those small town papers where all the local news snippets are packed together in tiny type without headlines or logical paragraphs. Five mentions of Mrs. Doe on five different dates is 200 pages or so of small print.
I suppose one solution is to not bother with the Red Bank Register and stick to papers with a better search mechanism that highlights the words of interest but, as it happens, I did have some people who lived in the Red Bank area.
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Well the old brain cells are not 190% anymore.. So I would put in name and area etc and up came loads of results -- but if I clicked onto the item, therefore using up a credit. What the results seemed to show where not shown - I know it was me, I have trouble sorting out how to word what I am searching for. So with the 500 odd credits I did find maybe one piece of info, but that I already had.
What I wanted to do was to see if there were any Obits for my lot in Leicestershire.
I almost offered the credits on here as it seemed such a waste. But eventually I used them when I decided to check any Obit in the Leicester Paper for the correct years... so I suppose that wasnt a waste. But a learning curve. Something like, engage brain before paying for credits and set out exactly what you need to search for. ::) ::) eee pathetic old dear ...arent I.
;D ;D
xin
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Well, one doesn't have to pay for the Red Bank Register so that's not an issue. My point is that one can't just click to see what the result is.
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Is there an advanced search? It's difficult to say how to narrow down the results if that's the way the system is set up - it does seem a bit strange though, to offer a search facility but then not give a clue as to where in the paper the result appears!
Could it be something simple like a browser issue? I know different browsers work better with some sites, and sometimes don't show all the features such as highlighting of words. Try it in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. Otherwise, see if they've got a 'help' section or contact them to let them know that you're finding it pretty much unusable.
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Ok, just had a look at the site - the images open as a pdf, so you then need to search again within the pdf for the name or phrase you originally searched for. I tested it out on the name 'John Smith' (original, I know!) and had to search again within the pdf when it opened.
The way you search varies depending on which pdf viewer you use, but generally speaking you press Control+F (Ctrl then the letter F at the same time) or there may a separate 'Find' function. Your viewer's help facility will be of use if you have trouble.
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Thanks, Archivo. I should have said I already tried that. It must be a browser problem though I haven't noticed problems with other PDFs. I'm going to put it on the back burner for now since another more profitable section of my tree is opening up for investigation. Phooey on Red Bank.
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Hi
I have just been playing with the British Newspaper Archive on Find my past (FindMyPast). I have a subscription so the cost of individual searches was not a problem.
The problems I did find were:
1. Find my past is still digitising the records so that much is missing but may appear in the next few months.
2. The digitisation seems to be the result of a computerised scan and so includes some garbage, which one needs to ignore.
3. The free search summary attempts to limit the information about the search target so that you will have to pay (or subscribe) to see the full text. An example might go " xdp of Lewis Chalmers. In Fraserburgh a son to ..." You can deduce from this that there is a birth entry for the family of Lewis Chalmers but nothing more until you pay to view.
4. After paying to view you will be shown the output from the computerised scan of the relevent sentence(s) and underneath this a display of a complete page with part highlighted, perhaps a paragraph, perhaps two or more columns.
5. There is a set of image control buttons in the top left hand corner of the image and you can use them to zoom in and pan about to find the relevant text. This can be a bit tedious on my lap top if I forget to use the given control buttons and just attempt to manipulate the image using the touch pad - when it shrinks to start size or slides off the screen.
One of the problems arises from the use of two names, the search on FindMyPast will not reveal articles on Lewis Chalmers if he is referred to in the article as L Chalmers and perhaps if Lewis is separated from Chalmers at a line break. You can work around this by searching for Chalmers but this will bring many false leads for other people named Chalmers. You can reduce these unwanted results by specifying a county and a narrow band of years to search but at the moment FindMyPast only gives you the option to choose a year range and a county.
Despite the problems I do think the FindMyPast British Newspapers archive is worth searching now: poking around at it in the last three days I have discovered that none of the daughters of Lewis Chalmers lived beyond their thirties and I have also found a report of the inquest on my GGrandfather, which I had been seeking for several years.
Good hunting
Gobbo