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Hi, my name is Jenni Salamon and I work on the National Digital Newspaper
Program in Ohio at the Ohio Historical Society. Today I'm going to show you
an advanced search technique for the Library of Congress's Chronicling
America: Historic American Newspapers website.
This is a great resource for historical research because newspapers covered a
wide range of topics. I'm going to show you how to find information on a topic
related to transportation in this screencast: specifically, the S.S. Sultana
tragedy of 1865.
The S.S. Sultana was a steamship that exploded on the Mississippi River just
north of Memphis, Tennessee on April 27, 1865.
Some estimate that over seventeen hundred people died,
many of whom were Union soldiers on the way back home after fighting in the
Civil War.
Let's go to the newspapers and see what we can learn about the S.S. Sultana.
With over five million newspaper pages, Chronicling America can be overwhelming to
search so it is important to use search strategies that will eliminate irrelevant results from the
beginning. One way to do this is by combining search terms. Let's try it out.
First, we'll search Sultana using the basic search option on the front page.
We're only using one word for this search to show why it's useful to combine multiple
words into one search. As you can see we've received over 20,000
results.
I performed these searches ahead of time and know that none of the results on the
first page are accurate--
although the word Sultana does appear on these pages, none of the articles are
about the steamship. What we did find was information about female sultans and
animals, among some other items.
Let's combine Sultana with another search term--
there are several terms you could choose such as reunion, boat, survivor or explosion,
but let's use disaster.
And although you can combine your search terms using the Basic Search right here,
we're gonna open up the Advanced Search by clicking on the gray tab so we can
determine the best way to combine our words.
As you can see, there quite a few limits to choose from here, but we're going to
focus on the first three search boxes at the bottom: with any of the words, with all of the words and with the phrase.
Let's clear out our previous search and type Sultana disaster
in the first search box: any of the words.
This time we received over 300,000 results.
This search finds pages that have the word Sultana, the word disaster and
both words. On the first page only half of our results are relevant.
Let's go back to the Advanced Search
and move our search terms over to the all words search box.
This time we received just under 1,400 results.
This returns only pages on which both words are present.
14 of our first 20 results are relevant. Some results are not relevant
because Sultana and disaster are in two separate articles on the same page--
one might be about a female sultan and the other might be about another disaster.
Let's go back to the Advanced Search one last time
and search this as a phrase.
This time we received 99 results. All of them on the first page
are relevant.
This search found pages on which Sultana disaster were side-by-side and in
the exact order that we typed them, as you can see here.
The best search strategies were the all word and the phrase search.
We have fewer results to look through and more of them are relevant. If you're doing your
own searches on Chronicling America and are receiving too many or inaccurate results,
think about other terms that add to your search and how you can combine them so that you
can more easily find the information that you're looking for.
Do you want to learn more about the S.S. Sultana or other topics covered by
America's historic newspapers? Try your own searches--Chronicling America is freely
available and more newspaper pages are added on a regular basis.
Visit the Ohio Digital Newspaper Portal to view additional resources such as
Subject Guides and the Using Chronicling America Podcast Series. Thank you for
viewing my screencast.