Resource of the Week

July 31, 2007

America's Historical Newspapers

Search full text and view page images of newspapers from hundreds of American communities published from 1690 through 1922. Users can limit searches to items that fall into such categories as news/opinion, election returns, letters, poetry, legislative information, prices, advertisements, matrimony notices and death notices. When complete, over 1000 newspapers from all 50 states will be available. Because they are scanned images, searching old newspapers can present challenges. Before searching, read the important search tip below.


Search tips:

  • As you are searching, keep in mind that newspapers are among the most difficult type of content to digitize because of the wide variety of constantly changing type faces, font sizes, ink quality, article format and more. The older the newspaper, the more challenging this process becomes. OCR works by recognizing shapes on a white background, and by matching those shapes with known letter shapes that are stored in the computer's memory. In some cases, especially in the case of old newspapers, the letters "bleed" into each other, making the shapes unrecognizable or mistakenly interpreted as other letters by the computer. Any problems on the page, such as inkblots, speckles, poor type quality, fading, folds, wrinkles, tears or discoloration of the original paper page, can interfere with the OCR process. When the computer cannot recognize or misinterprets some of the letter shapes on the page this can result in false hits for the researcher and mistakes in keyword highlighting in the results sets. A few of the most commonly misinterpreted characters are a, o, e, r, i, and n. Researchers can often minimize the problems caused by these misinterpreted characters in OCR databases by using wildcard searches. Wildcard searches enable users to allow for unlikely variations in spelling that might be caused by the OCR process. In America's Historical Newspapers, a single-character wildcard is a question mark and a multi-character (allow for up to 5 characters) wildcard is an asterisk. For example, a search that included the term majesty might yield a broader result if you use wildcards for the most commonly misinterpreted characters, as follows: m?j?sty. You might even want to try something like this: m?j?sty or m?j?fty, since many of the older newspapers used the old-fashioned elongated s character, which can sometimes be interpreted as an f. You can also use the multi-character wildcard to account for variations in spelling and possible misinterpretation of certain characters. For example, you search for St*nbock, instead of limiting your results to Steinbock.
  • To perform the most basic search, simply type a single term or a phrase in quotation marks into the "Search:" edit box and click on the Search button. You can also use multiple search terms connected by the search operators AND, OR, NOT, ADJ and NEAR.
  • To narrow your searches, use the drop down field boxes to limit to headlines or titles. It is also possible to limit using the limit tabs, by article type (death notices, letters, etc.), eras, place of publication and newspaper title.

    Where is it: Go to the UNLV Libraries' home page http://www.library.unlv.edu. Select the Articles and Databases tab, click on the A-Z List of Databases and then on the letter A and select America’s Historical Newspapers.

    Quick Link: http://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/HistArchive?p_product=EANX&p_action=timeframes&p_theme=ahnp&p_nbid=J6EJ56BOMTE4NTkxMzM3NS43NDYwODE6MToxNToxMzEuMjE2LjE2NC4xMDQ&p_clear_search=yes&d_refprod=EANX&

    • Posted by Shelley Heaton on July 31, 2007 2:16 PM |

    July 25, 2007

    Access Science

    Access Science is the online version of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology and the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms. It covers all areas of science including biology, engineering, environment, medicine, and psychiatry. It has 7100+ complete articles, 110,000 dictionary terms. This source also includes bibliographies with over 28,000 citations, links to evaluated web sites, image galleries, learning resources and study guides.

    Search tips

  • If your search term contains more than one word, by default AccessScience searches for the exact phrase. In some cases, you may achieve better results by connecting the words with AND. For example, entering "Thomas AND Edison" will increase your chances of retrieving the biography of "Edison, Thomas Alva."
  • Use the wildcard symbol * if you are uncertain of a spelling, or to broaden a search. For example, "St*rm-L*ville" returns definitions for "Sturm-Liouville problem" or "Sturm-Liouville system"; "power generat*" searches for "power generation", "power generator", etc.
  • To print an article, use the Printable Version button at the bottom of the page. This will take you to a version of the article formatted for printing. The print versions of the articles are formatted to fit on 8.5" x 11" paper, including illustrations and/or tables.

    Where is it: Go to the UNLV Libraries' home page http://www.library.unlv.edu. Select the Articles and Databases tab, click on the A-Z List of Databases and then on the letter A and select Access Science.

    Quick Link http://www.accessscience.com/server-java/Arknoid/science/AS

    • Posted by Shelley Heaton on July 25, 2007 2:53 PM |

    July 17, 2007

    Resources featured prior to July 2007...

    Resources of the Week featured prior to July 2007 are available at: http://www.library.unlv.edu/dow/previous-databases/index.html

    Posted by Michael Yunkin on July 17, 2007 10:35 AM |

     

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