GRL

Global Research Letters

Using Newspapers to Support Your Research | Papers Past

So let’s kick off. Um i usually preface these talks by saying that um papers past is useful for all manner of research qatar newspapers, newspapers qatar. It’s not just about family history research qatar newspapers, newspapers qatar but we’re smack being in the middle of family history month and let’s be honest lots of us are family historians. So i’m i will be throwing a few family history specific tips in here but keep in mind that the information i’m sharing and the tips i’m sharing are mostly equally applicable to any other type of research qatar newspapers, newspapers qatar so that in mind welcome to the papers past site. This is our home page. You can get to it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarby googling papers past or you go to paperspast.netlive.gov dot nz and we have five collections six collections. We’ll get to that later and the one you might be most familiar with is newspapers so the bulk of my talk. I’ll focus on the newspaper section but we’ll dip in and out of the other collections too and i’ll give you some pointers on where they might be useful for certain things because they they do all have different applicability and different value for different things. So we’ll start with newspapers. Hopefully some of you have seen this page before. Now the first thing to note with all of our collections like the newspapers collection the magazines collection etc is that most of these have organized your access to the collection around two ways of getting to content and the two ways in a nutshell are browsing and searching browsing. I think is worth dwelling on for just a minute. It’s quite important when you’re looking for a really specific page or a specific date or specific newspaper and the scenario for that is. I’m typically in family history research qatar newspapers, newspapers qatar. You’re looking for a birth notice and you know a person’s birth date and you have a they have a few thoughts about where that birth date’s going to be published. Now you’ve got a date to work off and you know roughly where it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmight be so you would browse. This is a really good way to find birth notices. It’s very thorough. It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardoesn’t rely on the optical character recognition in papers past being accurate or correct.

It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarrelies on your eyes to spot the information you need so equally. This approach is also really good for historic events. If you have a date where an event happened and you want to see the news around that browsing is a really good way to go. It’s very very thorough. Just takes a bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarlonger. I’ll show you browsing if you click on any of these three buttons. You’re going to go to this working great list of newspapers and it’s sorted alphabetically. But you could also sort it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarby region if you double click on these columns it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwill sort the opposite way around. You can sort them by year. You could also view all newspapers for a specific date to you know have a look at maybe all coverage around one particular date or one particular event you could look at newspapers within a certain date range like this so this page is handy just to give an example of how this might look you. Can if you have a hypothetical birth date for a person. Let’s say january 1922. You click on the newspaper that you’re interested in you know seeing if there’s a birth notice in it qatar newspapers, newspapers qataryou click on the calendar for that year you click on the date in question. Let’s say it’s 16th of january. Here’s that newspaper. Here’s that edition and you can see on the left hand side. You’ve got a list of the articles in here. This is a computer generated list. It’s mostly going to be correct. Um sometimes it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwill get the title wrong or might miscategorize it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarso be aware of that. Um images of the pages here are more useful. If you’re looking to do that old. School library microphone experience. Where you want to read the dots off the page and actually find things irrespective of anything computer generated. So you’ve got two options but if you were looking for that birth notice you could go straight to here and well this reveals to you that the print quality on this particular issue is pretty poor. This is not unheard of we. Try to find.

The best quality microphones we can for our digitization. But um sometimes we can’t find a better quality copy in existence and if you’ve only got one copy of a date of a newspaper it’s better to have some copy than none so this is something that you will see occasionally but you can also browse to the pages now again. This doesn’t resolve our print issue by any way checkbook form but these pages here allow you to browse to the next page within that newspaper if you wanted to. If you needed to go to page two or page three you can do that. This little um address bar navigation bar across the top i call it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatara breadcrumb trail. It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarreflects the structure of the collection itself. And you can use it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarto navigate around the collection for example if you’re looking at this article here but well print. Quality is not great. And let’s say you want to see the next column or the next article on that page you can use the breadcrumb trail to click where it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarsays page three. That will take you to the view of that whole page. You could click on the date there and it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwill take you to the issue that contains that page and that article you could you know. Click on the title. It’ll take you to that title so this little bar here. Click on these things and you can navigate between the various levels so the levels of a collection be like you know. Here’s all newspapers within all newspapers. You’ve got titles right. Click on that takes you to the title within each title. You’ve got a date you know so you click on that you’ve got a date within the date you’ve got pages. Here’s some pages on pages you have articles so it qatar newspapers, newspapers qataris a hierarchic collection. And that’s what that breadcrumb trail relates to use this to navigate your way around because you’ll find things you’ll find occasionally that you need to look at the whole page. If for example you’re only seeing half of an article and it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarshould be the rest of the text there somewhere you want to look at the page to you know. Get the full picture.

The other thing i would quickly introduce to you on these pages when you’re browsing is that you can save a copy of a page at a very high resolution if you want to take a copy of a page out for maybe inclusion in your own family tree or to snip out an article at a really good quality go to the save a copy button in the top right and choose high resolution image and that’s the best quality image. We have these are often sort of you know 40 or 50 megapixel images they they can sometimes come from an image source which is not great as you saw with the previous newspaper but we certainly put a lot of effort into making sure that we get the best quality we can from the source that we have access to. So that’s a very quick. Look through how you browse through newspapers and to a large extent. It’s very similar for magazines. Magazines aren’t too dissimilar from newspapers. They have a lot of very similar considerations so the way that you navigate through them is pretty similar cars dates etc you can see how that works fairly straightforward. Um i think one of the really useful things that papers pass brings is the fact that it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarallows you to search by keywords and this is handy because papers past has roughly 90 million articles in it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarand it’s not possible to browse to find every instance of everything that you need to find. It’s just not practical. So search is a godsend it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarreally speeds things up um and the enormous plus is that you know. We’ll search through the entirety of the collection in a second and a fraction of a second. So that’s great. The trade-off is that it’s not able to perfectly match your search term against the image on the page in every case. I’ll show you why that is in just a second but let’s start with a basic example of a search search is really variable because it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardepends a lot on the words or the names you put in for example in the names. If you’ve got an uncommon name that you’re looking for you’re in a really lucky place because you’re not going to get a huge number of results and if you’ve got a surname like smith or jones you’re you’re dealing with a big pool of results and it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarcan really take a lot of a lot of wrangling to find exactly the thing you need so i’m lucky the surname vandy.

Isn’t that common. So there’s not a huge number of results for vandy but if your name is smith just give you a very quick example you. You’re going to be battling with five point. Something million results there we go. Yeah it’s a a lot of stuff to wrangle it. So let’s go back into the just quickly. How search is imperfect. So you saw with that auckland star article that i first clicked on that births column. The letters weren’t printed super. Clearly you know they’re but the image quality of the microphone was poor. It’s a little bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarfuzzy so it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwasn’t able to recognize exactly the words in the article. So what that’s going to do is you might see scenarios where words are misrecognized. So this is i guess. Essentially the view that our computer has of the words on the page. You can see that for the bulk of these words. They’re correct but for the odd one here and there. They’re not recognized correctly. So this is a little conundrum. If you’re searching for a term and say 95 of them are recognized correctly. What about the other five percent. How do you find those. How do you deal with that. There are some strategies but for the time being just note that that is that is the case. We’ll come back to this a little bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarlater on so for the time being. I’m thinking more about this family. History problem and your name is smithfield and the person looking for might be a smith or a jones. How on earth do you deal with. 5.3 million matches for smith. Well the solution is think about the material. You’re looking for think about what that material looks like if you’re looking for an article about a smith ancestor and maybe their involvement in the horse racing industry just putting in the word smith is probably a limited use to you.

Because you’ll get all the smith results but you want the results that are about smith and include. Maybe the word horse or the word racing so think about it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarlike that. What are the words that are unique to the article or the item that you’re looking for you’ve got to think of it. Kind of like a fingerprint. In the case of looking for people the lowest common denominator and like the starting point should always be the surname. Because if you’re going to recognize that person they’ll be mentioned by their surname in the article. So i would generally from a family history perspective start by searching for the surname and that obviously applies even in the scenario where we’re dealing with. Smith’s just treat this as your starting point. Though so from this point you want to add in other words from the type of thing that you’re looking for now if you’re looking for birth notices your first question should be. What does a birth notice look like because if you don’t know what they look like it’s hard to create a search that’s going to really zero in on on those. Um i’ll show you what i mean. Go back to that auckland star. I’ll go back to. I know we spotted. That was oh. We’ll go to a better one. Maybe looks good. Hopefully this one looks good like this. No it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardoesn’t look great. Okay i’m gonna go to the next issue see if we have a similar problem and we quite like it. Well okay see. Here’s some they do. Have poor print quality. Take a close look at these and obviously we’re lucky we’re people and we can probably make sense of these words on the page. Despite the fact they’re printed poorly. There’s a few things you might notice. Um there’s a couple of patterns. We’ve got the surname. Um all of these have the phrase either a son or a daughter you can check that in each of these cases and two of these also have the phrase both well and it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarlooks like these also mention the date and they’re using a format with month and then the day the child would have been born on.

So there’s your fingerprint. You’ve got a name you’ve got the words a son or a daughter you’ve got in some cases both well but that doesn’t occur. In every case. So maybe just file that away in the back of the noggin and come back to that later but they’re also mentioning the date so now we’ve got an understanding of what a birth notice looked like published in a particular newspaper roughly around a particular date so that little block of information gives us an idea of how to construct a search for other births in that newspaper. Roughly in that time period surname asan or our daughter and a mention of the day. So now let’s construct a search that matches that pattern. Um i’m going to stick again with using the very generic name smith. We’re going to search for in this case a sun you’ll see. I put it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarin quotation marks. If i just added the words a sun it’ll give me results for articles that contain smith and the word. Ah and the word sun so that’ll contain what we want. But if you put quotation marks around the two words that occur in a specific order or a specific this is only going to give you results with occur in exactly that order or that pattern. So that’s handy so we’ve got smith we’ve got the phrase a sun and they mentioned a month and a day. Let’s just say february and i won’t put the exact date because i don’t know of a smith born on an exact date at some point in history so bear with me anyway so our birth notices from that newspaper they contain a surname the phrase asan or a daughter and they mention a month so if i click search now we should see some birth notice type results appearing. I have a look okay. So that’s quite targeted. I haven’t filtered it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarby date. I haven’t filtered it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarby region. I haven’t filtered my type of content but you can see that this content all looks very specific to births so this is because we’ve used search terms search words that are really specific to birth notices and we can do another example of that.

Um let’s think of this maybe in terms of the other great punctuation event in people’s lives deaths. What does a death notice look like. I don’t know if there um any deaths in this paper. Let’s find out. Yes there are. There’s a death column okay. They look like this. There’s a surname. Once again we have a month. Is there any other common language. Ah son wife. So there’s family relationships mentioned as well at her residence or at hospital. Okay so language like that so if i was writing a search term for death notice date. If you’re looking if you know the date that’s going to help otherwise the month that’s going to help the name the terms like either well the word residence. Were they a husband or a wife because it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarlooks like the word wife or you know daughter son etc. Those terms are mentioned so constructing a search term for a death notice would need to use language. That’s specific to death notices now. Think about this an extension to other types of material if you’re looking for results for let’s say this hypothetical smith ancestor. Who is somehow involved in horse racing. You might search the end of the word horses now. This would give you back. Articles that contain the word smith and the word horses. Let’s say you add another word in there. You see we’ve got we’ve brought that pool of 5.3 million smiths. We added the word horses that brought us down to about 490 000. We added the word racing. That’s now 77 000. So you can see that adding more words gives you a smaller pool of results. Because each time the article has to correspond to a narrow range of criteria. The article has to contain. You know three words. If you add a fourth word in there you can get an even smaller pool of results. But it qatar newspapers, newspapers qataralso means you’re looking for something much more specific so there’s your trade-off do you make the search term too specific you can make it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatartoo specific you want to make it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarjust specific enough. Otherwise you’re going to miss stuff out and this is also why i didn’t start striking at the deep end of searching for smith horses racing trotting saddle and all that sort of stuff.

Because it’s just going to leave you with such a vanishingly tiny amount of data that you’re probably going to miss out some of the valid stuff that you’re trying to surface so you normally do it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarsort of iteratively you start with that broad search for smith and you see how many results you get you search for the surname see. How many results you get. Then you might put in a keyword that might appear in the type of article or the type of item. You’re trying to find. Let’s say you might be looking for some mentions where a smith family had a house. Fire the word fire is likely to have been mentioned in that article so throw the word fire in there. Where did the fire happen. Do you know where the family lived. They might have lived in nelson. In which case did the article mention nelson. If you’re confident that it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardid add the word nelson in there and once again you can see that big. Paul smith results is becoming more and more specific. Let’s say the word brigade. The grade brigade. Spelling is likely to have appeared in the article. If you make that judgment call if you think that’s relevant then put that word in there as well it’s given us 16 000 results. It’s brought it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardown quite a bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarbut there’s no limit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarto the number of words you can put in it. The only issue is the fact that you are making it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarvery specific search result the more terms you put in so what this means. Is that any result out of the 16 000 it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarhas to contain each one of all of these four words. Now that’s all well and good. What if we have some results where we want to remove certain things. Let’s say i got given a really good example by a paper’s past user a year or two ago who had the surname garlic. I’ve used this example before now. This person was plagued by all of these advertisements and mentions of a business called thompson garlic all throughout this stuff.

So they’re searching for the surname garlic. But they don’t want all this thompson garlic stuff so there are some solutions for that the starting point for me would be to search for garlic and then put up minus thompson. This will give me every result that contains garlic that does not contain the word thompson. You can see that’s brought. Well what do we have. Previously we had 95 000 results. If you put that minus tons in there that brings it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardown to 65 000 results. Now you will notice that there is still a tonsin here. You and i can see this. We’re people we can read our computer can’t um it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarhasn’t recognized the word thonson because the print quality is not great just to confirm this. We look at text here the text view because the letters are all printed in quite bold font. It’s picked it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarup as ton. Sorry so not correct. And that’s why it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarhasn’t removed that particular one but you can see how that trick using minus works it’s handy and it’s another way to make a big pool of results smaller. So that’s trick number two for making the pull results a bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmore manageable and easy to work with this is for some of you. Who are familiar with using boolean. Operators this is the boolean operator for not so just to unpick the search term here. I i want results for garlic results that include the keyword garlic but do not have the keyword thompson within them now. There’s no limit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarto the amount of knots you can put in there. We could have garlic but not thonson and not shop so in theory this would remove those articles as well so it’s brought us down from 66 000 to 59 000 and you can chisel away quite surgically at those big pools of results to make them smaller by doing stuff like this but be aware of the collateral damage because you will get some collateral damage. Um an example would be a person like george day. If you’re searching for george day you would see tons of results for st george’s day so you might go minus sent. You might have george day minus st which is very clever but you might also be removing any result.

That includes the abbreviation for the word street. Because it’s also st so that would inadvertently remove a heap more than what you intended so just be a little bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarjudicious. It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardoesn’t hurt to try it. Um do you search keep track of how many results you see if you see them. Wildly swing one way or the other. Maybe just have a think about whether or not you’ve inadvertently excluded or included a few too many things. Um now um one of the questions i get asked about what papers passed quite a bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qataris. Where’s the advanced search interface. And i’ll show you where it qatar newspapers, newspapers qataris. You’re using it. It’s right there when you have the all of these words search type selected. You can do all these tricks like the minuses and you know adding extra keywords and including phrases things like that. Um i won’t hit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarsearch on that because it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmight not give me any results but you can combine a range of operators together to work flexibly. The search box becomes a space in which you can use fancy tricks like the knot and the and and phrase and other things like fuzzy search etc these other search options. They’re kind of presets if i was to type any of these words and if i put two words in there like cat and dog effectively. I’m searching for cat or dog if i was to choose this exact phrase. It’s going to search exactly for the praise cat dog which won’t show up. Obviously whereas if i do all of these words i can combine all of those things i could say cat or dog and i want a phrase included in my results as well um like that so that see if that gets any results no two results so you can see how that combines different types of search into one so the thing for you to note. Is that all of these words. If you have that option enabled that’s your advanced search and it’s up to you to maybe experiment a little bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwith including some of the fancy little tricks like multiple keywords the minuses the ors phrases and things like that and these are the options that that presets feel free to use.

Whatever gives you good results. There’s no right or wrong answer while i’m looking at this panel a couple of little basic things you can search through all of the content and we do have people who will come back to papers past every few weeks or few months and when we add new content they only want to search through the new content. So you can choose to do that as well. So we typically release something like around 100 000 pages in a batch and we might do that four to six times a year so if you want to search just that batch of new content the most recent one for example you take this and it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwould search only within that new data so a few weeks ago we released some material from the press and three other papers. I’ve just forgotten right at the moment but if i search with that option and i put in a common term. It’s not very creative. I know but it’s going to give me some results and you’ll see we get results from just those papers. It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwill be y wrapper age. There will be some press and get sorted in my title but yeah that type of search that option will bring things from just the most recent batch which in this case is waikato times the tinuru herald and the press. But if you are the type person that does come back to the site now and then you want to just search through this stuff you can just use that feature there. Um i probably haven’t dwelt quite enough on. I guess how we make the site searchable. Because i think it’d be useful for you folks to have a little bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarof an understanding about that like i won’t get super technical or anything but um handy stuff for you to know would be that we start with microfilm. We get reels of um preservation. Master microphones the best quality microphone. We can get in terms of image quality. We choose the individual reels that have the best image quality we can get and we feed those reels through a scanner. Which does you know. Scans every image on that reel so it’ll be hundreds of pages at a time and that gives us images that look like this so we then take those images and we run them through what’s called an ocr process.

That’s long story short. That’s where the computer tries to recognize every letter that’s on the page and it qatar newspapers, newspapers qataralso tries to record where that letter is and where each word is and that’s what powers the search function. So computers aren’t as smart as you and i as much as they would probably like to be. They are thrown off by things like variable print quality. Or if there’s you know the odd smear of anchor on a page here and there it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmight think it’s a full stop um might change what a letter looks like. It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmight make a letter. L look like the letter i all those kinds of little things will throw off that computer recognition process and it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmeans that some of the words. They’re not recognized perfectly. They’re not going to be completely exactly right like we have a word tl. I don’t know what that’s recognition based on. But how do you deal with that when you’re trying to find particular types of things and the words don’t aren’t recognized correctly i’ll show you a search trick. It’s a fuzzy search. Um and a fuzzy search is where it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatargives you results. That are very close to a certain word but you can specify how many letters within that word are allowed to vary. Now i’m going to use. I’ll use my surname. Why not 30. 847 results not that many now. If i was to do a fuzzy search it’ll give me every instance of every word that’s within one letter of being vandy v-a-n-d-y so it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmight recognize words like in non-dictionary words like v-a-r-d-y so the newspaper might have spelled vandy correctly but our computer generation process may not have recognized it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarand it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmight think it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarsays vadi so if you do a fuzzy search like this it’s going to include those results where one of the letters is misrecognized and this will invariably give you more results particularly for things like birth notices.

Um if you’re not particularly those but anything it’ll give you more results so we had 847 results. This will probably give us more. Oh yeah it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarhas. Yeah and you can see why because there’s other words that are very similar to vandy. That are one meter different randy pandy sandy et cetera. So you’ve included those if you have a name like smith’s however and you ate your 5.3. Million results for smith. What does a fuzzy search for smith look like. There’s going to be lots of occasions where smith is represented as smjth. So you can see it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarhad 5.29 million and now that’s gone up to 5.33 million so you’ve got an extra 44 000 results for smith and again this is kind of case by case because vandy is similar to sandy and all sorts of words but a smith. There’s not a huge amount of words that are kind of just like smith so for some names it’ll be really useful for some words would be really useful other words like something like a word that yeah like the word the or there. There’s going to be a lot of words that are like there that have more than one letter variation so you have a huge pool of results that wouldn’t be handy sounded like a bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarof a ramble on my part sorry i hope that is fairly straightforward long and short is our computers. Don’t always recognize words accurately. And if you want to surface instances where those words are misrecognized doing a fuzzy search is one of the ways to do it. Another way to do it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwould be to be specific about which letter might be misrecognized. You would recognize this word. What if one of those letters is commonly misrecognized. Let’s say that second r you could search for that you can see. The pooled results has gone up slightly 1.02 from 1.007 so there we’ve got an extra 13 000 results. That have misrecognitions of rotorua. Where that specific letter has been recognized incorrectly. So that’s one approach and another approach might be something like that. This is a wild card. It’s an asterisk so this is going to give me every word that starts r o t o r and that will be things like rotary not.

Just rotorua so you can see. It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwill bring back a lot more results. But it’s one way of substituting for multiple letters so whereas the question mark substitutes for one letter only the asterisk substitutes for multiple letters and depending on the word or the name. You’re searching for that can be a really handy thing. Um i think it’s probably worth noting just for you guys to keep in mind how case by case things are with names. I touched on that briefly. I guess already. But it’s worth thinking about. Uncommon names are really easy to search for common names and looking for specific people with common names a bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatartrickier. Um what would be handy common things. I think that family historians search for are things like passenger lists and shipping lists the approach for finding those is very similar to what i did for birth notices and death notices. If you’re not quite sure what they look like or quite sure how to set up a search for it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarand we’ll just quickly work through a scenario so that you can maybe find passenger lists yourself. So here’s how i would go about it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarpersonally. I would start by looking for a newspaper from the region of you. Know the port that you’re interested in where your ancestors or the people you’re looking for might have arrived in. Let’s say littleton. A lot of people came into the country by littleton. And let’s say they came in the 1870s so we want to see a sample of an 1870s passenger list from littleton. Now the best way to do this is actually just to go to one of these newspapers and read it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarand see what it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarlooks like um now shipping shipping is the column to look for it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarlists the names of the ships and in cases with a birth it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwill also list passengers so in the case of this newspaper these articles will always include. Well the word shipping if it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatargets recognized correctly the word littleton looks like they used arrived. They’ll have the name of the ship.

You may or may not have that or need that. But the other thing you’d be looking for is the surname of those people so the surname. You’ve got the word shipping you’ve got the name the port and you’ve got a rough date idea cool that’s enough to start your search. Let’s set a search for the place or the title you’re looking for so i’m just going to cheat and go straight to the little time. I’m going to set up a date filter because i’m looking for a date note a shipping notice from the 1870s. And then you want to quack your search term search terms in there god. This feels like a day where i’m cheating so much i’m gonna use again a really common name normally. I would take suggestions from the audience but i can’t hear you folks so i have to subject you to boring surnames rather than using surnames. You’re particularly curious about so the word shipping was included and the port was included and often the word passengers is included in those articles as well. So let’s do that. Search there and see we get it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarshould be relatively targeted to shipping notices and it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarlooks kind of like. That’s what we’ve got. Yeah we do. We have mention of passengers and looks like we don’t have a lot on the pastors. We do have a couple of passengers mentioned up here. I’m a bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmore used to like quite long passenger lists of 40 or 50 people. But um there’s an example once again we’re reading the material first to get an idea of what it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwhat a search term for it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmight need to include. What words should that search term include. And then we’re going and creating our search term and then you’ll see we get a bunch of results. So that’s how i’d go about looking for search notices. Um i’d backtrack briefly just to um birth notices as well for just a minute because there’s one very family history specific tip that i’d share with those and we saw it. Oh i’ll find any population of this issue. Most newspapers for the thick end of the last of the 19th and 20th centuries use this weird little printing format for names and within birth notices.

We can pretty much choose any date anything where there’s a birth notice. Um will there be someone here. They might be now. I’m not in that issue next issue. Maybe using that navigation bar next issue. I don’t actually know where the family notices are but again cheating here. We go first so it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarshould take us to a column of birth results right cool and this shows the thing. I’m about to talk about so if you look closely at this article you see. It’s got a surname. Now you and i recognize that as a name. Um that’s that’s the name that’s the word done. These are the letters after it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardon’t matter they matter to our ocr. Our computer text recognition process. You’ll see that there’s no space between the name and the full stop and then this long dash and the word on so when computer text recognition is working it. Looks it qatar newspapers, newspapers qataridentifies a word by going. Well there’s a space at the start and there’s a space at the end. The bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarin the middle must be the word and it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarlooks for matches for that word. So what we’ve got here doesn’t have a space after the name. So here’s your name and it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarthinks all these extra letters are part of the name. So how can you match a name with all these extra. You know. Non-dictionary characters the word hampton dot dash on is not a name. It’s not a word. How do you surface it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarin your search results. There is a solution for that. Connects those wild cards that we talked about before. Um let’s do a quick little search this so the name that we were looking for was hampton. And let’s just see how this appears hampton. Okay if we search within this issue for hampton it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmay not turn up. Oh it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardid this time so it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarturned up there but it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarhasn’t found this one here. I know this is part of the same notice but bear with me. Bear with me for a moment so if it’s not finding this one here it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmay not in all cases find the birth notice because it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmay not mention the surname elsewhere allegedly in the article in the birth notice but the solution would be to search for hampton and then an asterisk that wild card for multiple unknown letters so if you look at the search term it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmeans hampton and any other letters or characters that follow the word hampton and in this case it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwould actually make that result.

Turn up if it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardidn’t already turn up because it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwas mentioned here this. This particular example is not the greatest. But i see this all the time because the printers always use this weird little format with the dot and the long dash and the word on immediately after it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarit. It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmeans those results. Don’t turn up in regular birth notice type searches so the solution is to do that. Wildcard search and then you know think about your other keywords like sun etc so if you’re hitting a bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarof a brick wall finding birth notices in particular. Don’t forget that every single newspaper that we had pretty much used that annoying little format from printing names and it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardoes make searching for specific names a little bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardifficult if you want to surface them. Um you might want to think about throwing a wildcard after the name. I’ll try to find another one just to find a better example for you and try this one martin or mckinnon. Yeah the same issue would apply often searching for martin that result may not turn up and here is what that word effect looks like as far as our computer is concerned. Um what are some other essential things for you folks to know about or to understand um probably one thing would be a little bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarof credit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwith credits due this is our stats page. What i would like to show here is just the size of the collection and this is not to big note us in any way shape or form. I would just like to point out that all of this works scanning all this material. The bulk of this was done by two people. There’s eight million odd pages worth of content scanned here and it’s my colleague tracy and my colleague mel that i would like to acknowledge for doing all of this work because the start of the show here is not the papers past site.

It’s actually all the content in the papers past site and it’s that massive digitization effort that they’re responsible for that has resulted in us having the ability to use this resource and search through this material. So my acknowledgements to them. They have done some unbelievable work. Um some i guess other basic little housekeeping when you’re using the papers pass site and you’re searching for some names or people or some subjects or some things some terms you don’t have to just restrict yourself to one material if you click on any other collection it’s going to take you to search results or that same term in those other collections. So as you if you have a search and you just click on another click. That’s going to take you straight to those other types of results magazines and journals are fairly straightforward. I find them personally an amazing resource for recipes. I like to cook. And there’s tons of amazing recipes in there. I’m always on the lookout for a really good date scone recipe and it’s a common search term that i would use and this is where i would find it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmore pertinent for family history research qatar newspapers, newspapers qatar. I think is um dare i say it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarprobably the new zealand police gazette. If you’re lucky enough to be getting results for searches from the police gazette one of the things that you might find that you find that you might find really handy. Are the mug shots. The photographic quality of the images of people in the police gazette is superb compared to what it qatar newspapers, newspapers qataris in the newspapers collection. Now i’ve seen a lot of instances where people emailed us saying. I found this amazing photo of great great uncle. Burt um in this thing called police gazette. What’s he in there for. And you’ve got to be a little bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarrespectful and delicate around why they might have appeared with a mug shot in the police gazette but haircut these images great like the actual image quality is brilliant as you can see compared to a newspaper the print quality is a step up so if you want to see good likenesses of your ancestors and if they got up to a bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarof mischief then you’re in luck with police gazettes.

It’s a brilliant title. Um and just to explain a quick little thing for you about it. You’ll see these. These inscrutable looking codes beneath the images. Now i got no idea what all this stuff fp class 29 17 etc. I don’t know what that means but this part here pg 1021. This is really handy. What that means is police. Gazette 1910 page 21 and that page. If i go to that reference this will tell me what um james barnes did that will give people context so if we go to page 21 or 1910 that’s this one starts on page 47 so we’re looking at the previous issue page 39 page 25 age 21. So he is mentioned somewhere on this page now. Because i have a memory like a goldfish. I have just immediately forgotten his name. But here you have a description of his offense when it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarhappened where the court case was and also things like you know their build. Their appearance distinctive marks that kind of stuff and this helps flesh out your picture of the people that you’re looking for. It’s a really really interesting resource. Having the information obviously for the name and some kind of event happening it’s really handy then to be able to jump into the newspapers and look for corporates. Um that’s another useful thing for you folks to know. Um books just started a books collection. It’s a very young collection so it’s it’s raw as a heck. It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarcontains a lot of our a lot of titles that we just scanned because we needed test cases for certain things so we haven’t taken any sort of deep curatorial look at the type of material that the collection should consist of in the long term. It’s actually just all our test data but it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardoes also include a bunch of works from the natangario maori collection. And that’s quite a special little collection so i mentioned at the start that we have six collections and papers fast you might have looked across the top and gone.

No it’s five. Aha we have six. The sixth collection is the natangario maori collection and this is every printed work in triomari from the 19th century every single work known to of existence. Now from the perspective of a person who’s trying to learn about maori. Um this is a phenomenal resource. Because it’s written by people who often never spoke a word of english and they spoke maori. How it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwas spelt how it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwas pronounced. You know how it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwas spoken before pacquiao before english settlers got here so it’s a snapchat of as the language was at that point in time now this natangara maori collection. It’s not just one type of material like it’s not just books. Some of the material is in parliamentary papers and some of it qatar newspapers, newspapers qataris in magazines and journals some newspapers whereas i guess from a european perspective we consider like a collection of newspapers. And it’s just that type of material whereas natanga al-mari it’s in every one of these collections and you can search for that material simply by searching for the keywords. You’re looking for these will be the almaty terms you know. Search through the natangario maori collection. You’ll see the interface changes slightly to give you that. Cue that you’re looking through some different material then you hit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarsearch and boom there you go. You got some search results all written in a lovely beautiful snapshot of tedious maori from particular dates if you click on any one of these other collections. You’ll notice that it’s taken your search term into that new collection and it’s kept. It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarfocused on te reo maori. Uh on the natandi collection and same again with newspapers. Same thing occurs so this collection i think is really really special. It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarthere’s about i think 1500 or 1900 items that sort of magnitude a thousand and a bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qataritems that are known to have existed. And we’re trying to digitize all of them. We haven’t done all them yet.

We’ve done some of them. Um but this being able to capture and digitize the entirety of my printed from the 19th century i think is really awesome and if any of you are lucky enough to have um in this area i mean. This is the best text resource that we could possibly put in front of you. And i hope it’s useful for some of you and i think that’s all of the essential stuff. I would be very happy to take any questions from you. If any of you do have any questions. I will have a look in the chat. It qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardoesn’t appear to be a q a control on this one. But please do let me know if you have any questions last bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarof housekeeping. I will always answer any questions. You have not just now and today but if you’re ever using papers past and you’ve got some questions like oh amazon. What about the copyright on this. What do i do you know. I will help um actually on that front quickly. Show you a thing if you’re using papers past and you’ve found an article if you’re curious about whether or not you can copy that piece maybe into a book that you’re writing have a look and see if there’s a using this item section and if it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarsays no known copyright you know no brainer go ahead use it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardo what you want with it. Have fun if it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarsays that there is some copyright. Well then you can still use it. If it’s for your study your academic purposes you can still use it. If it’s for purely personal research qatar newspapers, newspapers qatar you know that’s if you’re literally writing a text that you’re going to email to your family members no issues but if you are looking at getting a book printed published then it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarmight end up in libraries or you’re paying a publisher to print it qatar newspapers, newspapers qataror they’re paying you then you might want to think about copyright and do a bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarof due diligence but the using this item section in that case would look a little bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatardifferent. See if i can quickly find what it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarwould look like for you and just randomly jump into one. I think there’ll be some around you know from 1937 here using this item stuff is the copyright owner of the timberwood herald.

And it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatargives you some basic instructions it’s got a creative commons by ncsa license. Um copyright is a complex little field if you’re wanting to use something from before 1900 it’s a no-brainer. Go for it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarif it’s before 1920 probably going to be okay but check and see if there’s an author mentioned if you want to use something from after 1920 and if you’re not quite sure what to do then you can always email me any emails that go to papers passed at netflix. And z. They will come to me. And if it qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarsays something like you know stuff limited you can always approach those guys and say okay. I want to reproduce a copy of this. Do you have a high-res copy i can license. A few they’ll probably say sure. Give us a little bit qatar newspapers, newspapers qatarof money. You go for it. And you know that’s your licensing covered off so if you had like a couple of images and you want to put them in a book that kind of seems like not too onerous. But it’s case by case and there’ll be cases where i can find something for you which is out of copyright which might be exactly the same as in copyright thing and. I can suggest that you maybe use that as well. So feel free to reach out to me if you’re confused about how to use papers past or any aspects of copyright any aspects of usage. Whatever you just want to ask about what papers we’ve got coming up or if you have suggestions i’m always always and i think that’s about all um i did mention our help page at the top of this talk here. Is the help page everything i talked about today and some examples is on this help page so hopefully this is a useful reminder for you for a few things if you want to get hold of us um our contact details are all over the site and also on our help page just email me and i will do my very best to help okay. I think that’s all thank you very much.

Where to find great research papers?

Various great research journals such as Global Research Letters are a great option and way to help you look up impactful research papers with a great format. Here, you will find a number of various research papers that are provided and made available to you in the journal, which will help you write your own paper.

You can very easily find papers on a variety of topics at Global Research Letters, which will help you with your own research work and understanding of writing and publishing research papers properly. With access to so many amazing research papers, you can practice and learn the process of writing research papers and their importance.

 

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *