Search inside scanned newspaper pages
search_newspapersSearch the OCR text inside digitized American newspaper pages to find phrases absent from titles or catalog records. Filter matches by state, publication, and year range, and get page-level excerpts with source links.
Instructions
Search the text inside digitised American newspaper pages held by the Library of Congress. This reads what optical recognition took off the scanned pages, so it finds a phrase that appears nowhere in a title or a catalogue record. Double quotes change how the Library matches the words, and it decides what they mean: a page can come back carrying the words apart or in another order rather than the phrase as written. What the quotes do to the number of matching pages varies from one query to the next, so run the search both ways rather than expecting either form to return more. 'total' counts the pages that match, and they page: ask for page 2, 3 and so on to see beyond the first answer. It is not a count of how many times the words occur. Each match names the newspaper, the date, the leaf of the issue and the state it was published in, and 'source_url' opens that leaf with the query applied. 'location' keeps to papers published in one state, 'publication' to a single paper, and 'year_from' with 'year_to' to a span of years. A filter matching nothing is dropped and the answer says so. Every match carries 'excerpt_kind', and the excerpts are labelled with it in the text. A 'passage' is the text around the words that matched. A 'page_opening' is the start of the page, sent because the text the Library returned with the row stops before those words appear, so it does not carry the match and quoting it quotes something else. Use search_items instead when looking for a work by its title, creator or subject.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| page | No | Which page of matches, from 1. | |
| limit | No | Matches to return. | |
| query | Yes | Words or a quoted phrase, such as '"cure for influenza"'. The index reads the text off the pages themselves and holds single characters, so a query of one character is a query it answers. | |
| year_to | No | Latest year, inclusive. | |
| location | No | The state a paper was published in, written as the Library writes it: 'new york', 'district of columbia'. It is the value 'state' carries on the matches this tool returns. | |
| year_from | No | Earliest year, inclusive. | |
| publication | No | One newspaper, named with its town and the years it ran: 'new-york tribune (new york [n.y.]) 1866-1924'. Take the wording from 'publication' on a match here, or from a title in search_items with media_type 'newspapers'. | |
| max_excerpt_chars | No | Budget for one passage. Read it together with 'max_excerpts_per_match': the size of the answer is the product of the two and the number of matches. | |
| max_excerpts_per_match | No | Passages to keep per match. A page holding the words several times yields several, and the later ones rarely say anything the first did not. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| hits | Yes | ||
| page | Yes | ||
| notes | Yes | ||
| query | Yes | ||
| total | Yes | Newspaper pages that match, not the number returned and not a count of occurrences. Raise 'page' to read further into it. |