HIST 3209A Canadian Urban History

Winter Term 2010-11

Illustrated London News 1859

Using the keyword-searchable CITIZEN

I am revising this as new information becomes available, mostly from more experience with searching and from other users. Check at bottom for date of latest revision.

1. Since 1986: Since 1986 the Ottawa Citizen is searchable on the Canadian Newsstand database, accessible through the C.U. Library website. Find Journals & Journal articles  Newspapers  Canadian Newsstand. This database excludes advertising (including paid death notices) but includes all news and editorial matter and letters to the editor. Photos are not there but the captions are. (Note that there are other online newspapers accessible through the C.U. Library search screens, but few local ones.)

2. 1853-1987: An article by Kelly Egan in the Citizen of 3 Feb. 2010 (p. B1) announced that Google News has digitized the back run of the Citizen. It was supposed to run from the paper’s beginning in 1846 up to 1986, but coverage does not begin until November 1853 and terminates in February 1987. When first made available the database also included some scattered later dates, and then resumed in 2009. These later dates have now disappeared, probably because they overlapped the Canadian Newsstand coverage (Sec. 1 above). The disappearance of 2009-10 is regrettable because it included the advertising and illustrations that are omitted from the Newsstand version. Google News Archive is, however, a FREE and easily navigable site. There are limitations that one has to be aware of, but this is an extremely important new resource. Egan says Google is doing all the major dailies; the is already up (but seems to be really thin for the 19C, even moreso than the Citizen, about which more below). The Gazette reported a lot of Ottawa news a century ago, incidentally, and it can be searched to supplement the Ottawa papers for that period, especially re federal planning efforts.

Coverage. Egan’s article is wrong about Citizen coverage starting in 1890; doing an ADVANCED ARCHIVE SEARCH without a search term and then clicking on the graphs shows that there are scattered gaps right through the run, though they become less frequent in the 20th century. There is no explanation about content offered on the Google site. There are major gaps in the survival of the newspaper in the 1850s and 1870s, and some apparent gaps are explained by alternative masthead titles, as noted under (a) below, but the omissions in the Google News version are more extensive than that.

Accuracy. As Egan says, the OCR software has trouble reading the fonts, especially in the 19th century. For example, Ottawa Valley Marble Works in Arnprior ran an ad in every issue for several years 1859-61, with the name of the town appearing in each ad twice, once in upper case and once in lower. A search on MARBLE turns up a number of occurrences; a search on ARNPRIOR turns up none. The keywords come up in a few lines of context, and for most of the run the other words all look to be standard English. 2 On 19th century searches, some spelling errors come up in surrounding words, suggesting failure of the OCR scanning software to decipher some of the text. However, stories in recent decades that one knows are there sometimes don't come up either. One needs to experiment with various search terms. There is a button "Flag this edition as unreadable" at bottom right. Presumably this alerts Google to a problem of legibility of the images, but one has to in fact get into such an issue in order to determine this.

Go to http://news.google.ca/archivesearch/advanced_search. a) Under SOURCE type Citizen. Until Google News digitizes another newspaper with the name Citizen this is the best way to do it. If you enter Ottawa Citizen you will not get results for 1873 for which the masthead title was The Citizen, nor for the long period November 1879 to October 1890 for which the title was Ottawa Daily Citizen. Typing the source as Ottawa will also bring up issues of the Ottawa Times for December 1865 through December 1867, scattered issues of the Ottawa Free Press from the 1870s and 80s, and seven issues of the Ottawa Argus of 1850/53 (which was actually an Aylmer paper), but also an extensive run of the Ottawa Free Trader from Ottawa, Illinois! b) Enter your keyword search terms under FIND RESULTS. There are four options: all words, exact phrase, at least one of the words, and without the words. All words seems to work best. Remember to be creative in coming up with keywords. The results appear in no apparent order, but you can click on the graphs at the top of the results screen to narrow the date, or click on SEARCH OTHER DATES. One sometimes has to persist in inserting the other dates if a result comes up that is still later than you are trying for.

The search engine occasionally bounces out of the Ottawa Citizen and starts giving results from newspapers all over the place. c) Navigating within the paper. Once you click on a hit you can manoeuvre around the page by manipulating the blue rectangle in the thumbnail at top right, and use it to browse back and forth within an issue of the paper. You can enlarge and reduce the image using the buttons on the toolbar. The FULL SCREEN button is the box with four arrows in the toolbar; it allows you to see a little more of the page at once. d) To advance to the next issue of the paper, or to go back to the previous one: Once you have clicked on a hit, you will see BROWSE THIS NEWSPAPER and BROWSE ALL NEWSPAPERS buttons at top left. Clicking on the former allows you to move forward and backward in the paper’s run; you can select intervals from day to decade using the drop-down SHOW menu at top left. This also reveals how appallingly many issues are missing, even in the late 20th century. For example, for the month of the J.F. Kennedy assassination in 1963, only the issues of Nov. 14 and 30 are available; there are only 10 issues from October and 19 from December, not good for a daily paper. It is unclear why so many issues that are on the microfilms are not in the scanned version. BROWSE ALL NEWSPAPERS brings up a list of other papers Google has digitized; it is alphabetical by title rather than by city or town, and note that the date ranges are often inaccurate. e) Help screens. "Archive Search Help" (at top right) explains some of this, but note that the screen that initially comes up is a promotion for digital partnerships; you need to click again on “News Archive Search Help” or “Search Tips” at the left to enter the help screens. There is a “Contact us” button that allows you to ask questions: a good step forward as it has been difficult to direct comments or questions to Google in the past.

3 f) Printing articles. There is so far no internal capability for downloading or printing, but you can take a picture of an article off your computer screen with a digital camera; the date of the paper even conveniently happens to appear at top left just above the image, but for some reason the date that appears there is sometimes a day or two earlier than the actual date of the newspaper (so remember to check the top of the newspaper page, and also to note the page number manually, as the page numbers on the screen, too, sometimes do not accord with the printed page numbers).

Alternatively, one can use the “Print Screen” button on your computer and paste the image into “Paint” and print from there. Here is the procedure for this:

Click on the FULL SCREEN button on the tool bar (the button with the four arrows) to maximize the page on your screen. With your mouse, drag the image on your screen to place the article in the position in which you would like it to print; you should move the desired article to the top left of your screen. On your keyboard hit the PRINT SCREEN button. Click on START  Programs  Accessories  Paint. Click on EDIT and then PASTE to bring up the screen that was captured when you hit the PRINT SCREEN button. Drag the article toward the top with your mouse till only “Ottawa Citizen” and the date appear in blue above it. You can ignore the next two sentences and simply print the screen by skipping to the last sentence. But if you wish to have just your article, you can click the SELECT button in Paint (the one with the rectangle in dashes at the top of the right column of buttons on the left) and use your mouse or cursor to draw a box around the article you want (including the newspaper and date header above it); then right click COPY, and click FILE and NEW and reply “no” to the pop-up query; then right click PASTE to insert your article. You can enlarge the article by dragging the bottom right corner of the article outwards, but it will start to pixilate; it is better to maximize the size of the article before you copy it to Paint. Then hit FILE  PRINT in the toolbar and proceed as you normally would to print from your computer. g) Other local papers. Other local newspapers are also on Google News Archive such as the Bytown Gazette (1836-45), Ottawa Times (1865-67), Carp Review (1905-11, 1915- 30), Buckingham (Que.) Post (1895-98, 1903-75) and scattered issues of the Ottawa Business Journal since 2003, though the OCR software seems to have done a fairly poor job on the Carp Review. There are also broader-coverage papers such as the Canadian Jewish Times (1910-14) and Canadian Jewish Chronicle (1914-67) which have some local content.

If you need to consult issues of the Citizen that are missing from Google News Archive, you will have to consult the microfilms on open access at Library & Archives or the reference department of the Main Branch of Ottawa Public Library. The latter has microfilms of a number of other Ottawa newspapers, and LAC also has some unmicrofilmed titles. OPL Main Branch has the best hard-copy holdings of Ottawa community newspapers, mostly from the 1970s onward, but their online catalogue currently contains only more recent listings; if you need to consult these I suggest you speak with Brian Silcoff in the OPL Ottawa Room.

Revised 10, 13, 17 Feb., 13 Mar. 2010, 2, 10 Jan. 2011 BE