Historic Language and Historic Newspapers: Strategies for Breaking the Language Barrier

1. Historic Language and Historic Newspapers: Strategies for Breaking the Language Barrier Christopher Cronin, University of Colorado at Boulder Martha Hanscom, University of Wyoming Nancy Chaffin, Colorado State University Colorado Association of Libraries Conference November 11, 2005

2. Agenda • Introduction to the collection • Issues around using historical newspapers • General search strategies • Keyword searching • Stop List • Searching broad and narrow topics

5. Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection • http://www.cdpheritage.org/collection/chnc.cfm • Collaborative project between the CDP, Colorado State Library, and Colorado Historical Society • Library Services & Technology Act (LSTA)/Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant to digitize the microfilm of Colorado newspapers • Started with 48 newspapers from 1859-1880, but grew to 85 newspapers though the year 1923

6. Using Historic Newspapers • Technological: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) • Accuracy is dependent on the quality of the microfilm, and quality of the original when it was microfilmed • Cultural: changes in publishing practices, journalistic practice, and language usage.

8. Differences in Journalistic Practice • Shorter articles • Mixture of fact and opinion • Variant language usage: from obsolete and archaic to derogatory and offensive • Additional resources: • Newspapers by Anne Rubenstein, on the Center for History and New Media web site (George Mason University). Available: http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/unpacking/newsmain.html • Uncovering our history: teaching with primary sources by Susan H. Veccia (American Library Association, 2004)

9. General Search Strategies – 1 • Broad topics: if you’re interested in transportation, search for specific modes of transport • Railroads, stage coach, horses, wagons, automobiles • Even more specific: names of transportation companies like Union Pacific, or Ford and Buick

10. General Search Strategies – 2 • Limit searches for common terms to specific dates or newspapers • Be creative when searching for geographic areas • Broaden and narrow searches appropriately based on results: if a newspaper doesn’t list “Ford”, search under “cars” or automobiles”

11. Keyword Searching • See pages 3-5 of the Searching Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection handout • Connectors: and, or, not • Phrase: quotation marks (plus connectors if needed) • Only case-sensitive when an initial capital is used • Truncation/wildcard: asterisk (*) • Punctuation: do not use apostrophes (’) • Spelling: be aware of alternate spellings • Abbreviations: be aware of different practices in abbreviations (e.g., Wm. for William)

12. Stop List • Do not search with common words: a, an, at, the • Words that are too common will generate an error message: “The following errors occurred: The query string is empty. The following words are very common and were not included in your search: [term]” • Use asterisks creatively: “Gre* War”

13. Searching for a broad topic – Immigration

14. Choose a topic Read secondary sources Use a thesaurus to find words to search Strategy

15. Strategy • Break up topic into smaller elements • Search one aspect • Examples: Education or language • Limit search by date range or geographic area

16. Strategy • Use wild cards (*) • *migration or immigra* • Combine terms • Immigrants and literate • Try alternate spellings • Theater or theatre

17. Test the search strategy See what results you get Get ideas for other search terms Refine the search Try the search again Strategy

18. Searching Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection

30. Examples of search results