RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: Top-of-the-hill on Tuesday 18 November 25 21:05 GMT (UK)
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Have they done something with this bit of the website, or has something gone wrong with my system? I have always had the Kent newspapers as a bookmark, but what I find now looks very different.
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Logged in this morning and the layout had changed/ Getting some strange results when using filters :-\
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I think the layout is clearer, and sets out the possibilities. It allows you to enter dates without interfering and trying to tell you what you want! I have always thought it was a better searching tool than the BNA anyway so this puts it further ahead.
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Just when everyone gets used to how it works, some spotty “youf” decides they know better and changes it to suit what they think people want!
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That is how I felt. I believe Molly is a more advanced and professional researcher than I am, but I knew exactly what I was doing for what I needed.
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Just when everyone gets used to how it works, some spotty “youf” decides they know better and changes it to suit what they think people want!
You may be making an unjustified assumption here ... :D
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We started from the printed index to The Times which I think was issued quarterly, and card indexes in local libraries. In recent decades we have moved from conventional indexes which are constructed using a controlled list of index terms, to free-text searching where almost any word will serve as a search term but may give results you were not expecting e.g. synonyms. When computers were first applied to the problem their capacity was not sufficient to support this kind of searching so terminology was still controlled. The earliest on-line databases were largely in the field of science which lends itself to that. Free searching of such a huge newspaper database has its pitfalls.
This change may actually be the result of some analysis about how people have used the index, and how long it has taken each search to find a satisfactory result. What the new style is trying to do is guide your choice of search terms within some broad categories, and organise your thoughts, so slightly more structured than a free-for-all, to give better results overall.
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I may be getting on in years but I am tech savy. The old system worked fine so why change it, the new system does not gain anything. As the saying goes 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'
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Just when everyone gets used to how it works, some spotty “youf” decides they know better and changes it to suit what they think people want!
You may be making an unjustified assumption here ... :D
They may not be spotty? :P
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I think the layout is clearer, and sets out the possibilities. It allows you to enter dates without interfering and trying to tell you what you want! I have always thought it was a better searching tool than the BNA anyway so this puts it further ahead.
I am with Molly
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Coming back to this, I still find this newspaper search very difficult to use. I have a cutting in my hand which must be from a local Kent paper, but undated. I have tried names, keywords, date range and any combination with absolutely no result. I know I am not too good at this, but should it be this hard?
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Coming back to this, I still find this newspaper search very difficult to use. I have a cutting in my hand which must be from a local Kent paper, but undated. I have tried names, keywords, date range and any combination with absolutely no result. I know I am not too good at this, but should it be this hard?
I use the FindMyPast newspaper search a lot. I've found that when something like this has happened to me its often not the search terms that are at fault, but the quality of the original scan.
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Coming back to this, I still find this newspaper search very difficult to use. I have a cutting in my hand which must be from a local Kent paper, but undated. I have tried names, keywords, date range and any combination with absolutely no result. I know I am not too good at this, but should it be this hard?
If its a physical cutting, perhaps the particular paper or the relevant date is not yet online.
Happy to give it a go if you want to post or pm the details
Boo
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It could well be hard especially if you know neither the newspaper title nor the publication date. It's quite possible that FindMyPast Newspapers don't have the edition you're looking for or the names have been mis-transcribed.
Have you tried searching on Ancestry? Ancestry quite often throws up interesting newspaper references - even without a newspaper sub - and it's relatively easy to cross reference these to FindMyPast in order to view the original.
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Extensive though FindMyPast/BNA and Newspapers.com maybe, I can only imagine they cover a small fraction of the UK historical newspaper archive. The two key local newspapers relevant to my own family havent had a single word archived at either site!!
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Ray - I think you may have solved this. I don't believe the Kentish Gazette is available for the 60s/70s and that is the most likely place for the cutting to have come from. Must bear that in mind in future!