- Many browsers have the capability of tabbed browsing, which opens a new pane in the current window, either in the background or the foreground. Users of Chronicling America have reported this as a useful method of navigating through search results- bringing up each result in a new tab. This may be accomplished by clicking with the right-hand mouse button (for Mac, hold down the Command key) and selecting "Open Link in New Tab."
- Search results are displayed on a page that can easily be bookmarked or navigated to via the "Back" button on the browser. Every page in the Chronicling America application can be bookmarked, but only the addresses containing newspaper pages should be treated as canonical for purposes of citations and long-term referrals. These addresses are displayed in the address bar of the browser, and no special treatment is required for adding them to a citation database. (Select the "Persistent Link" URL displayed on each newspaper page view to store the link without search text highlighted.)
- 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 (i.e., searching for shorter words and phrases when possible in order to maximize the number of search results returned).
- 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 thumbnail 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. An alternate results list is available through the List View, which will display descriptive textual links to individual pages, where search terms will be highlighted in red wherever they occur on the page.
- 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, use the mouse scroll wheel, or simply click on the page image. Additionally, you can use the cursor hand to "grab" and move the image any direction, within the page frame. To return to the original full-page display, select the "go home" icon on the floating 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
A good and historically significant example of missing issues is in the San Francisco Call, where the April 19th and April 20th issues from 1906 are missing due to the devastating San Francisco earthquake that prevented the newspaper from publishing on those days. In this example, the "not digitized, not published" indicator displays as such: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1906-04-19/ed-1/.
earching by Language Chronicling America
Chronicling America supports language-specific searching in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish (although not all languages may be represented at this time). By default, in both Basic and Advanced Search, all content is searched together regardless of language. To limit searches to a specific language, conduct an Advanced Search and choose the appropriate language from the Language drop-down menu. For additional technical information on how languages are encoded and identified for search, see current NDNP Technical Guidelines at http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/guidelines/.
Why use language-specific search?
Chronicling America's search engine utilizes language-specific dictionaries to include word variants for your search terms. This is often called "stemming". For example, the search term house, when stemmed, would also return words like houses and housing. In Spanish, words like hermano would include stems such as hermanos. By default, the exact match (unstemmed) results will be ranked higher than the stemmed results.
Other reasons for language-specific search may be more content related. For example, reporting in Spanish about the building of the Panama Canal may convey a different perspective than reporting in the mainstream English-speaking press.
