Search inside scanned newspaper pages
search_newspapersSearch the full text of digitized American newspaper pages from the Library of Congress to locate specific phrases or keywords, with optional filters for state, publication, and year range.
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. Put a phrase in double quotes to match it whole; without quotes the words are matched separately, which finds far 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. The Library returns the opening of a page's text with each row rather than the whole page, so the searched words are often further down than the excerpts reach: 'words_located' says which of the two happened for each match. 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"'. | |
| 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. |