Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 6 - How to Change Your Searches to Get Better Results

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This is part of a series of educational posts, intended to provide you with information that will rapidly improve the skills needed to find pertinent newspaper articles from historical newspapers.

Lesson 6 is all about overcoming the deficiencies in the scanning and creation of the search index for old, historic newspapers.

If you do newspaper research online as part of your your genealogy or history pursuits, then you have certainly been puzzled by some of the search results (or lack thereof) that you have received.
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Creation of newspaper images and application of the OCR process does not always result in what you might expect. You might want to refer to Lesson 4 - Historical Newspaper Research - Lesson 4 - Search Index and OCR as well as below:

There is a simple explanation for these issues, and it all has to do with quality:

• Quality of the original material - was the newspaper old and brittle when scanned?  Was it yellowed?  Did it have dirt on it or lots of ink spots?
• Was the scan performed to create the digital image and the index from the original paper, or from a microfilm of the paper, or worse a copy of the microfilm?  Every additional copy or scan degrades the resulting image and when the OCR process is applied the index suffers.
• Quality of the OCR software.- some are better than others
• Quality of the writing in the original newspaper.  Did the author get your person's name spelled correctly?
• Quality of the typesetter - did the typesetter get every word from the author set up correctly?

Thus what you are searching is not a perfect digital index that represents what was originally written by the author and newspaper publisher.

What can we do about it?  There are lots of things to try and this article deals with changing the letters in your search criteria.  For example - if the name you are searching for is "Wilson" and the letter "n" is often picked up as the letter "m" why not search for "Wilsom"?

I guarantee that changing your search criteria will lead to an improvement of at least 5 to 10% in search results. I heard from one reader that changing word pairs got them a 20% improvement.

So what word pairs are often confused?:

• rn and m  (ar n and em)
• h and b
• Capital D and O
• i, l, 1, /, !, and I are all often interchanged
• 0 and O
• c and e
• r and n
• [, ] and l (el)
• nl and m  (en el and em)
• Capital R and B
• n and ri  (en and ar eye)
• v and y 
• Capital S and 8
• Capital S and 5
• Capital Z and 2
• Capital G and 6
• Capital B and 8
• Capital K and |<

My suggestion?  Change your search criteria and exchange the letter string you are looking for to include these alternative letter and letter pairs and see what happens.  You might be pleasantly surprised!

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