Search Tactics for Newspapers
Our next series of quick tips about newspaper search strategies were prepared by Maci Coates, one of the UNT Digital Libraries’ Feedback Assistants. Maci is a Junior Communication major from Weatherford, currently working toward a Legal Studies certificate along with her major coursework.
The newspapers–and all text documents–in the UNT Libraries’ Digital Collections are fully-text searchable. The Texas Digital Newspaper Collection comprises over 830,000 newspaper issues, starting in 1812 and moving to the present.
Searching through these thousands of newspaper issues can be intimidating and complex. We’ve prepared our next set of Quick Tips to help you learn and strategize about the different search methods available in our digital collections.
You’ll find the different search methods linked in the top, right-hand corner of every page inside the Portal, Digital Library, or Gateway to Oklahoma History. To access them, you can click the arrow next to “Search.”
For example, if you:
- Know only a couple keywords, along with maybe the decade or location, try Basic Search.
- Know some keywords as well as phrases that are commonly associated with those keywords while searching but don’t want them to show up–we recommend Guided Search.
- Know a couple words that would likely be near each other in a sentence–Proximity Search will be your best friend.
- Know exactly the item you’re looking for and all its specifications? Try Advanced Search.
Our next quick tip will walk you through different situations when Basic Search is most helpful!
Collections in the UNT Digital Library
UNT Scholarly Works is actually part of a family of collections in the UNT Digital Library. In addition to UNT Scholarly Works, we maintain UNT Theses and Dissertations, which is one of our largest and most popular collections; UNT Graduate Student Works, which houses things that fall outside of traditional theses and dissertations that have been accepted by a professional organization or approved by a faculty member; UNT Undergraduate Student Works, which is for our undergrads to highlight their work that has been accepted by a professional organization or approved by a faculty member; the UNT Data Repository, which houses research data and is usually linked to work in UNT Scholarly Works; and UNT Funded Research Projects, which hosts data management plans for grants awarded to researchers that require public access to research/data outputs of the grant.
You can search these collections individually or search the whole UNT Digital Library.
