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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the Newspaper Directory?


The Newspaper Title Directory is derived from the library catalog records created by state institutions during the NEH-sponsored United States Newspaper Program (http://www.neh.gov/projects/usnp.html), 1980-2007. This program funded state-level projects to locate, describe (catalog), and selectively preserve (via treatment and microfilm) historic newspaper collections in that state, published from 1690 to the present. Under this program, each institution created machine-readable cataloging (MARC) via the Cooperative ONline SERials Program (CONSER) for its state collections, contributing bibliographic descriptions and library holdings information to the Newspaper Union List, hosted by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). This data, approximately 140,000 bibliographic title entries and 900,000 separate library holdings records, was acquired and converted to MARCXML format for use in the Chronicling America Newspaper Title Directory.


Why are there pages from only certain states?


Chronicling America is part of a phased project called the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). This program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanties (NEH), awards money to individual newspaper archives to digitize and deliver historic newspaper content to the Library of Congress for inclusion in Chronicling America. In 2005, NEH made 6 awards to institutions in California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah and Virginia to provide content for Chronicling America from 2005-2007. In addition, the Library of Congress contributed digitized content from Washington, DC. More states and territories will provide content during future phases of the program.


When will more pages be available?


Additional newspaper page content will be created by NEH awardees over the course of 2-year awards and added over time to Chronicling America by LC. NEH will host an NDNP annual award competition, gradually increasing the content time period and the geographic representation through additional awards.


Why does the View Text link on the full Page screen show misspellings and badly-formed words?


The View Text option in Chronicling America displays machine-generated text that is produced by Optical Character Recognition software. Optical character recognition (OCR) is a fully automated process that converts the visual image of numbers and letters into computer-readable numbers and letters. Computer software can then search the OCR-generated text for words, phrases, numbers, or other characters. However, OCR is not 100 percent accurate, and, particularly if the original item has extraneous markings on the page, unusual text styles, or very small fonts, the searchable text OCR generates will contain errors that cannot be corrected by automated means.


Although errors in the process are unavoidable, OCR is still a powerful tool for making text-based items accessible to searching. For example, important concept words often appear more than once within an article. Therefore, if OCR misreads one instance of a key word in a passage, but correctly reads the second instance, the passage will still be found in a full-text search.


Why are there variant spellings of counties and cities in the Newspaper Directory Search?


The Newspaper Directory browsing for county and city are loaded dynamically from the Chronicling America directory records. Misspellings in place names are the result of typographical errors in the CONSER records and can only be corrected in the original CONSER records hosted by OCLC WorldCat. Please contact a CONSER member (http://www.loc.gov/acq/conser/conmembs.html) with library holdings of that title to request cataloging improvements to these records.


Why do diacritics and non-English language characters sometimes appear "Romanized" or not in their original alphabets?


The Newspaper Directory provides access to newspaper title records cataloged according to standard bibliographic rules. Until recently, most non-English language characters were difficult to represent in library records and so Romanization - or standard rules for transliterating other alphabets to the Roman alphabet - was used to convey phonetic pronounciations of non-English words.


I've discovered a Directory newspaper title record in need of updating or editing, what should I do?


Newspaper title information included in Chronicling America is downloaded at regular intervals from the CONSER (Cooperative Online Serials Cataloging) databases. In order to update or edit bibliographic records for Chronicling America, please contact a CONSER member (http://www.loc.gov/acq/conser/conmembs.html) with library holdings of that title to request cataloging improvements to these records.


How do I cite or reference newspaper Directory records and pages for re-use (e.g., in a Web site or other electronic display) or reference (e.g., in a bibliography or journal article) external to Chronicling America?


Chronicling America supports persistent links to newspaper Directory records and pages by providing a predictable URL, displayed in the descriptive information for that object. Using the proposed URI Template syntax the links will use the pattern:

  • http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/lccn/{lccn}/{date}/ed-{edition}/seq-{image sequence}

Where:

  • lccn is the # Library of Congress Control Number for the newspaper
  • date is the date of the issue, specified as yyyy-mm-dd (e.g. 1902-01-30)
  • edition is the edition number for that date (e.g. 1)
  • seq is the image sequence number (e.g. 23) for that issue.

For example:

  • http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/lccn/sn84026749/1903-01-08/ed-1/seq-2


How to View

All images of historic newspaper pages, as well as uncorrected page text, are displayed through your web browser. However, Chronicling America also contains high-resolution images (JPEG2000) and enhanced text (PDF) that may require special viewers. Most viewers can be downloaded free from vendor sites. The links below explain the various formats used and how to access them.


Download and View Pages Offline

PDF
(Portable Document Format, .pdf)		Used for page images Adobe Acrobat Reader

Adobe text-only download page 		- Sample PDF
- About this sample
JPEG2000
(.jp2)		 - Wavelet compression technology

- Tiling supports decompression of only that portion of the image requested by the user

- Compression ratio is approximately 20:1, depending on image content and color depth 		Windows:
- ER Viewer 7.0
- Kdu_show
- IrfanView with JPEG2000 plug-in

OS X:Preview supports baseline JP2 only; commercial software may be needed to view tiled JP2 files, such as those in Chronicling America. 		- Sample JPEG2000 page
- About this sample

General Searching in Chronicling America

Results listed first are most likely to be relevant to your search. Results will appear higher in the list when they contain

  • more of your search terms;
  • repeated search terms;
  • search terms that occur near each other;

Your searches will yield better results if you keep the following points in mind:

  • Common words such as and, not, and the are ignored by the search engine. (Note: Boolean operators must be ALL CAPS).
  • Case of letters is ignored. For example, Civil and civil are treated the same.
  • Diacritic characters (accent marks, in non-English text) and other special characters produce inaccurate results, so plain (unaccented) letters should be substituted for letters with diacritics.

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators allow terms to be combined through logic operators. Chronicling America supports AND, "+", and OR, as Boolean operators (Note: Boolean operators must be ALL CAPS).


Search for a Phrase

Put quotation marks around the phrase you are searching.

When searching for a phrase, enter the words in the order they are most likely to occur.

The order of search words does not affect the scope of the search results, but it will affect the order of their display.


Too Many Results - If a search generates too many results, try using more specific terms.


Too Few Results - If a search generates too few results, try alternate terms or broader subjects.


Because language changes, be sure to use search terms used at the time the materials were created, even if those terms are now obsolete. For example, the following historic terms will produce more results than their modern-day counterparts:

Modern Usage vs. Historic Usage comparison table
Modern UsageHistoric Usage
gas, service stationfilling station
African AmericanAfro American, Negro
voting rightssuffrage

Use the names of towns, landmarks, bridges, buildings, and other geographic features that were current when the materials you are searching were created.


To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the "*" symbol.


Matching an exact phrase can be useful for searching place names or when common words have a particular sense used in combination.


For example, the term "normal school" was used in the early twentieth century to describe schools for training teachers. Searching for the exact phrase may eliminate results containing the words "normal" and "school" in unrelated ways.


Note: Some very common words, such as and, of, the, a, and to, are ignored even when matching exact phrases.


Searching the Newspaper Directory

First, review the General Searching information above. The Chronicling America Newspaper Directory contains more than 138,000 serial title records for historic newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present. Also included are over 900,000 Local Data Records indicating which libraries hold which copies and in what form. These records are created and edited by members of the Cooperative Online Serials (CONSER) cataloging program and currently hosted in the OCLC WorldCat bibliographic catalog. A copy of these records has been included in Chronicling America. Updated CONSER records will be added to Chronicling America at regular intervals.


Users can search the Newspaper Directory in a variety of ways, utilizing the data encoded by CONSER catalogers. Search results rely on the unedited CONSER data as it was created in the MARC format.


Keyword searching will match words that appear in most narrative fields. For example, matching an exact phrase can also be useful if you know a standard Library of Congress subject term, such as "description and travel" or "frontier and pioneer life."


For the Keyword search box, entering multiple terms without a specific Boolean operator will automatically search for matches with all terms (default operator = AND).


You can limit your search for Newspapers in the Directory by a variety of search options. For some users, knowing the origin of these options will help in precise searching. These options rely on specific MARC fields in the title and local data records, as follows:

State 752 $b
County752 $c
City752 $d
Begin Year008
End Year008
Frequency008
Language 008
Ethnicity Press650
Labor Press650
LCCN010
Material Type852

Searching the Newspaper Pages

First, review the General Searching information above. Chronicling America provides access to historic newspaper pages digitized under the NEH/LC National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). For more information on the scope and content of the program, click here (http://www.neh.gov/projects/ndnp.html).


Choose Search the Newspaper Pages to find

  • information on persons, places, or events
  • specific topics or news of the day
  • concepts or ideas
  • unique passages of text, such as the source of a frequently-quoted phrase


To make the most of searching this text, take advantage of the search options provided on the Search page.

  • To limit your search to particular geographic area, select one or more States.
  • Or, you can limit your search to a particular newspaper, or select several newspapers, picked from the list of titles currently available in Chronicling America.
  • In addition or alternatively, you can search the entire date range available (default), or select a specific date and limit your search to a specific year, month, or even day, using the begin date and end date lists provided. (Note: selecting the same begin month/day/year and end month/day/year will provide links to every page available for that specific date.)
  • In addition or alternatively, enter a specific search term or terms in the Keyword boxes provided. The operators provided will influence the results of your search significantly and can be used in separate searches or in conjunction within a single search.


All pages are digitally scanned - primarily from microfilm, described, and automatically processed for full-text searching through a process called Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This text is organized in normal reading order (by column) and left uncorrected. Search strategies may take this into consideration.


One helpful way to use the full-text search feature is to enter a term or phrase containing many words that characterize the topic you wish to investigate. A full-text search will then retrieve pages with similar passages, displaying links to individual pages, where search terms will be highlighted in red wherever they occur on the page. An alternate results list is available through the Thumbnail View, which will display small page images with red highlights visible representing the occurrence of searched terms. This visual interface allows for quick review of full pages and search terms to determine the most useful results to view at full-size.


Selecting a search result will bring up the newspaper page, initially displaying the full page. To read or view the page more closely, select the + or - to magnify the image. You can also select the "Draw Zoom Box" icon and use your mouse to select a page area (i.e., depress right mouse button and drag across the page to "draw a box") to magnify. Once the page is magnified, you can use the cursor hand to "grab" and move the image any direction, within the page frame. As the image moves, it will gradually re-draw, allowing you to move across the page at your discretion. To return to the original full-page display, select the square Reset button on the navigation bar.


In addition to the action icons used for this page image, other icons on this bar provide access to alternate digital formats for this newspaper page which can be downloaded. Click on the text link to download these formats.


In some newspapers in Chronicling America, issues or pages in logical sequence are not available digitally (usually because images were absent from the microfilm used for digitization). Whenever possible, any known information about these issues is provided, as follows:

  • Not digitized, published
  • Not digitized, not published
  • Not digitized, publishing unknown