UNT Libraries

UNT Libraries’ Digital Newspaper team oversees three NEH-sponsored, National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) grants for Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.  These grants are awarded to each state in two-year cycles, and they support digitization of 100,000 pages of pre-1923 newspapers.  UNT has received the NDNP grant for three cycles of Texas newspapers and two cycles of Oklahoma newspapers.

Andrew Weidner is the project coordinator for the New Mexico NDNP project, and he is based at UNT and collaborates with the University of New Mexico for the project.  They received notification in Fall 2012 of receipt of a second cycle renewal, to add to the initial 100,000 pages of New Mexico newspapers digitized.  Early Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico newspapers are text-searchable and readable through Chronicling America. Texas newspapers digitized through NDNP are also available via The Portal to Texas History, and the Oklahoma newspapers are available on The Gateway to Oklahoma History.

So, sometimes when you're performing a general search in The Portal to Texas History, you really don't want 70,000 hits from newspapers.  Here's how to avoid them.

Although the Portal makes it easy to restrict your search to newspapers, we don't yet have a native way to restrict your search to everything but newspapers.  It's tempting--but not entirely precise--to handle the problem by eliminating the keyword "newspaper" from your search.  Consider the following examples:
 

Search String Results shoes Searching "everything" full-text with the keyword "shoes" yields 78,799 items in the results list. shoes -newspaper The same search with the keyword "newspaper" eliminated produces 2,361 items. shoes -newspaper -newspapers Eliminating both "newspaper" and "newspapers" gets it down to 2,172 items.

 

Seems logical, but the last two searches will exclude from the results list any items that have the word "newspaper" anywhere in the text or metadata.  For example, the photograph "Young Woman in Bathing Suit" will be eliminated because that young woman happens to be looking through a cutout in a newspaper.

A better solution is to tell the search system to eliminate anything that actually is a newspaper.  This requires a "URL hack" to remove the newspaper "resource type."  Oddly, the easiest way to do this is to search for newspapers in order to display the appropriate syntax, and then insert a "-" in the URL between the "=" and "dc_type."  Seem complicated?  Here's an example of how to do it:

1. Go to the basic search screen in the Portal.
2. Enter the search term "shoes" in the box, click the word "Newspapers" above the box, and then click the "Submit" button.
   
   
3. Now look at the URL in your browser's address bar. You should see http://texashistory.unt.edu/search/?q=shoes&t=fulltext&fq=dc_type%3Atext_newspaper.
   
   
    
4. Insert a minus sign (hyphen) in the URL between "=" and "dc_type."
   
   
5. Press the "Enter" key on on your keyboard to resubmit the search.
6. Voila!  You now have a results list of 3,934 entries for items that are not newspapers, but do contain the word "shoes" in their text or metadata.
   
   

 

You can learn more about searching in The Portal to Texas History by visiting our Basic Search Guide.

--submitted by Nancy Reis, Publications Specialist, Digital Libraries Division