The Yale Daily News Historical Archive
FAQ
Effective Searching for Names and Phrases To achieve precise results when searching for names and phrases (e.g. Kingman Brewster, Harkness Quadrangle, Mastodon Bones), select "advanced search" (from second menu bar below header). Select "Across all fields," enter search terms in "The exact phrase" search box, and click the "search" button. This approach will yield far better results than the keyword search utilized in the generic search box.
Downloading Issues or Pages Download a full issue in Adobe Acrobat PDF format by selecting "complete print version" from the dropdown list under "view" (upper left) and click the "go" button (the download may take a while). Download selected pages by choosing the "subset of print version" option.
Searching by Year or Era "Selected Years" (on header in page view window) or "view by period" (on second menu bar below header) options provide links for browsing available segments of the collection by eras or by years.
Searching and Limiting by Date of Publication A. Find specific issues most easily by entering the date in the search box in the format YYYYMMDD without hyphens or spaces (e.g. 19670301). To retrieve all issues from a given month, use an asterisk as truncation symbol: YYYYMM* (e.g. 196703*). B. Alternatively, you can use the Search By Date feature in "advanced search" (on second menu bar below header). Here you can limit a search to a specified date range or you can retrieve all issues in a date range by leaving the search box blank. When entering search terms, be sure to select the "Description" field from the dropdown list of fields to search.
Printing Pages The best way to print well formatted full pages is to use the "subset of print version" PDF download in the "view" dropdown list. (See Downloading Issues or Pages in this FAQ.)
Printing Articles Click on a highlighted article to display all segments of the article in a new window, including text that spans multiple pages. Select Print Preview from the File menu to format the article for printing so that no text is lost. Specify suitable orientation (portrait or landscape) and scale (e.g. 70%).
Direct Links to Pages The "reference url" option (on third menu bar below header in page view) offers a direct link to the displayed page, which can be used in a citation or an external web page.
Direct Links to Articles Click on a highlighted article to display all segments of the article in a new window, including text that spans multiple pages. Send an email message containing a direct link to the article by selecting "Send Link" from the File menu.
Copying and Pasting Text A. The best approach is to download an issue or a page in PDF format (see Downloading Issues or Pages in this FAQ). Use the "Select Text" tool to select and copy text into another application (e.g. email or word processor). B. Another approach is to display page image and full text transcript side-by-side by selecting "page & text" under "view" (upper left) and click the "go" button. Note that search terms are highlighted in both frames. Select and copy text from the right-hand frame. Warning: text does not always appear in order and may contain Optical Character Recognition errors.
Imperfections in Full Text Transcripts When full text transcripts are viewed or copied from online displays ("page & text" and "page description" views) or from PDF downloads, the text may not appear in correct order and may contain transcription errors or random characters. The scanned newspaper pages are converted to searchable text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and are not manually corrected. The intent was never to achieve perfect OCR, rather only a level of accuracy above 90% which will provide effective indexing.
Exclude Stop Words from Searches When entering search terms, avoid using common words such as "the" "and" "with" "be" "would" "have". Common words (stop words) such as these are not indexed. Including them in a search will result in the message, "Your search retrieved no results."
Erratic Highlighting of Search Terms Search terms are normally highlighted in red when full pages or articles are displayed, but on some occasions (when a phrase spans two lines of text, for instance) the highlighting may not be present. In that case, repeat the search using the "Search this object" option (upper left above the list of pages) and the highlighting will usually appear.
"From the Archives" Features in the Current YDN Articles appearing on the current Yale Daily News site frequently contain links to related articles from the historical archive (look for the FROM THE ARCHIVES heading with a page thumbnail image). This feature effectively integrates the archive into the current publication.
Search Across Multiple Digital Collections at Yale Use the cross-collection search feature on the Digital Collections site to retrieve results simultaneously from several Library Digital Collections, including Visual Resources, Manuscripts and Archives, Beinecke Library, the YDN and more.
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