The following is a guest post by Robin Butterhof, a Digital Conversion Specialist in the Serial and Government Publications Division.
Chronicling America has a new look! This month, we’ll be exploring the new Chronicling America interface and providing tips on how to best use the new site. In this series of posts, we’ll show you how to use multiple keyword search options and facet your search results to narrow your search. We’ll also look at a map of all the digitized titles, clip out a newspaper article, see what issues we’ve digitized for a particular title, and much more.
On the new Chronicling America interface, simple search is at the top of every page.
To access the new Advanced Search, click on the “Collection Items” tab. Click the “-” button to minimize the Advanced Search and the “+” button to make it reappear again.
![Advanced search box with expansion/contraction button circled.] https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america {Please leave the campaign code off of this. The Advanced search box doesn’t open if you add the code](https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/files/2024/12/2_AdvancedSearchToggle.jpg)
Advanced Searches: Titles, Issues, and Pages (Full Text)
In the Advanced Search, you can search by title, issue, or page. If you click the button for “Titles,” you will search the title of the newspaper, not the full-text. The example below searches for “weekly journal” in the title of the newspaper.
If you click the button for “Issues,” you will search the full-text of the newspapers, but you will get results shown at the issue level. To see the search results on a specific page, click the text “View with Search Result: View X Pages” shown on each result.
We recommend searching “Pages (Full Text)” if you wish to full-text search. This will show you the page-level search results with your keywords highlighted.
Keyword Searches
You can do several kinds of keyword searches in the advanced search. Proximity searching specifies whether keywords are next to, near to, or within a given distance from one another. Proximity searches are useful when searching historic newspapers because you may want to search an exact phrase, such as a place name or a historic quote, or you may want to use broader search criteria because you’re uncertain how a newspaper printed a phrase, such as a person’s name.
Select the “Pages (Full Text)” and then choose one of the options from the “All of these words” drop-down menu: “All of these words,” “Any of these words,” “This exact phrase,” “These words within 5 words of each other,” or “These words within 10 words of each other.” Next, type your keywords into the box.
Searching “All of These Words”
Searching “all of these words” requires all of your search terms to be on a specific page. If you want to search for articles about President Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War, we recommend using keywords “Lincoln Grant” since they were often referred to by their last names, and use “All of these words” since they may not be located near each other in an article or on a page. You could use the start and end dates to narrow your results to the Civil War period.
Searching “Any of these words”
If you search “Any of these words,” only one of your search terms must appear on the page, even if you have multiple search terms. Since this casts a wide net, we recommend using unique keywords as well as date limiters. You might try common misspellings or alternate terms as well. For example, you might want to search in the year 1865 for “Appomattox” as well as misspellings like “Appamattox” and “Appomatox.”
Searching “This exact phrase”
If you search “this exact phrase,” your keywords must be right next to each other, without any other words in between. If you want to search for articles about President Abraham Lincoln, you might search for “President Lincoln” using “This exact phrase.”
Searching “These words within 5/10 words of each other”
Searching “These words within 5/10 words of each other” ensures that your keywords are close to each other, but they might not be right next to each other. For example, if you searched for “John Booth” and “within 5 words”, you would get results that included “John Wilkes Booth.” If you searched for “John Wilkes Booth” as an exact phrase, you would miss references to “John Booth” or “John W. Booth.” We usually recommend the “within 5/10 words” search rather than the “exact phrase” search for this reason as well as other reasons, such as errors in optical character recognition (OCR). For example, you can see that the search result set includes “John likes Booth” and “John Wilket Booth,” two examples of OCR errors.
Advanced Search Limiters: Location, Language, Ethnicity, Date
You can narrow your search by State/Province, County, City, and Title. For example, if you want to search only Arkansas titles, select “Arkansas” from the “State/Province” drop-down menu, and only Arkansas titles will appear in the “Title” field. You can also limit the search by date and by ethnicity, such as African American, German, or Polish. If you limit your search to “Front Pages Only,” your keyword is more likely to be an important topic on that day.
You may get the following notice with your search results, “Your search timed out. Some results may not be displayed. Refresh Search to see more results . . .” If you see this message, you have only retrieved part of the total search results due to high site traffic.
Facets
Facets allow you to refine your search and narrow or expand your search results without starting a new search. You can facet by newspaper title, date, state/province, county, city, ethnicity, language, subject, newspaper page.
Let’s use the “President Lincoln” exact phrase search as an example. Searching for “President Lincoln” returns numerous search results, with many of the articles published after his death. If you wanted to find newspaper articles published while Lincoln was President, you can use the date facet to limit your search to 1860-1869. You can then further refine your search by specific year. If your search is too narrow, you can select the “X” next to the facet to remove that search criteria.
Perhaps you want to read what African American newspapers wrote about Abraham Lincoln. You can do this by using the “Ethnicity: African American” facet. Wondering what the thick black lines are on the newspaper page? This is a mourning border, commonly used by 18th and 19th century newspapers to mark the death of an important person.
Need help? Reach out to us through the Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room where you can get assistance through the Ask a Librarian service, phone, and chat. If you need help, please contact us and a librarian will be glad to answer your questions. You can find additional search tips and strategies on Chronicling America: A Guide for Researchers which provides an overview of the digital collection as well as recommended search topics, search strategies, website features, and frequently asked questions.
Try out a search in the new Chronicling America interface today!
The Chronicling America historic newspapers online collection is a product of the National Digital Newspaper Program and jointly sponsored by the Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities.