search strategies for digitized newspapers

[Erato]

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. 

[Marylene_G]

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

[majm]

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)

[ggrocott]

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.

[Finley 1]

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

[Marylene_G]

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?

[Erato]

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.

[Finley 1]

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.

 

xin

[Erato]

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.