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You can perform a simple search by typing keywords in the search box at the top of the screen and clicking [GO]. The search engine will find any records that include all of your search terms.
You can search for an exact phrase by placing quotation marks around your search terms, for example "new plymouth".
You can use Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to refine your search results. AND (include all of the words) and NOT (without the words) narrow your search; OR (with at least one of the words) broadens your search. For example, plymouth NOT new will retrieve articles about Plymouth but not New Plymouth.
The Advanced search screen allows you to limit your search results in a variety of ways. It also allows you to specify how you would like your search results sorted and whether you would like preview images displayed in your search results, as well as choose the number of search results that you want to display on each page.
You can limit your search to:
A date range
A content type (such as Shipping information or Advertisements)
As a default the search engine will look for results that exactly match your search term/s.
If you do not get many results, you may choose to do a fuzzy search instead. Fuzzy searching will find a word even if it is misspelled. It can be very useful when searching text generated using OCR software, as there are varying levels of accuracy depending on the quality of the original newspaper or microfilm. For example, a fuzzy search for Christchurch will find Ohistohurch (a surprisingly common OCR mistake).
We offer two levels of "fuzziness" — close match (slightly fuzzy) and inexact match (rather fuzzy).
Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is a process by which software reads a page image and translates it into a text file by recognising the shapes of the letters (The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials).
The searchable newspaper text in this collection has been automatically generated using OCR software. It has not been manually reviewed or corrected.
To look at the OCR text for an article, click on the Show computer-generated text of this article link on the Article page.
OCR enables searching of large quantities of full-text data, but it is never 100% accurate. The level of accuracy depends on the print quality of the original newspaper, its condition at the time of microfilming, and the level of detail captured by the microfilm scanner. Newspapers with poor quality paper, small print, mixed fonts, multiple column layouts, or damaged pages may have poor OCR accuracy.
The OCR text contains an estimated OCR accuracy for the page on which the article appears.
Operators during the OCR process have assigned damage codes to poor quality images. When available, these are displayed along with the computer-generated text of an article to account for low OCR accuracy.
The page numbers that display on the screen have been taken from the printed pages and therefore may reflect errors in the original text.
Newspaper articles can be printed directly from your web browser.
We have supplied PDF versions of newspaper issues and newspaper pages so these can be printed more easily.
In general, you only need a common web browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer to search and browse this prototype.
Printable copies of newspaper issues and pages are provided in Adobe PDF format. You will need a PDF viewer like Adobe Acrobat to view or print these files.