Hints for Seaching the Newspaper Indexes

NEWSPAPER INDEXING

The library is currently indexing the Kamloops Daily News and the Merritt Herald.
Some historical issues of the Shuswap Market and the Chase Weekly have been indexed.
The Ashcroft Journal was indexed from Jan 1990 - Jan 1999.
Some 1993 and 1994 issues from the North Thompson Times were indexed as well as issues from Jan 1995, to Jan 1999.

WHAT IS INDEXED

Stories that are local in nature. These must be news oriented in order to be included.
The obituaries column.
The Ashcroft Journal indexes birth announcements.
The Chase Weekly, Shuswap Market, Ashcroft Journal and the North Thompson Times have indexed photographs.

WHAT IS NOT INDEXED

Minor items about automobile accidents, crimes committed, lottery/bingo winnings, meeting announcements, etc. unless they have warranted a major story.
Advertisements; comics; recipes; travel section; general interest columns; religion section; sports pages; classifieds; entertainment pages; real estate inserts

HOW INDEXED

The purpose of indexing is to allow a searcher to pinpoint the article so they may locate it and read it for themselves. The purpose is not to provide a short synopsis of what is in the article.

Significant key words only.
Common words omitted: the for a to in of at etc. e.g. University College of the Cariboo becomes (University College Cariboo) e.g. an article about Kamloops Secondary School, NORKAM Secondary School, Sahali Junior Secondary School and Stuart Park Elementary school would have the following indexing (Kamloops Secondary School Sahali Junior Stuart Park Elementary NORKAM)
Key words appear in any order within an entry.
Punctuation is not used. eg. Ltd. will be indexed as (Ltd) with no period at the end.
Key words are used exactly as they appear in the newspaper. Words that are not in the article are not used as key words.

OBITUARIES

An indexed entry for the Obituary column will simply be a string of all names that have appeared in the column on that particular day, even if they have appeared on a previous day.

Names are as they appear in the column.
Nicknames and maiden names are included if given.
Date of death is not included.

SEARCHING HINTS

Each word you enter must be at least 3 characters long.
Automatic end-of-word wildcarding. Entering 'forest' will match with forest forestry forests and foresters.
AND OR boolean operators. AND requires that both words be in the record. OR will return records with either words in the record.
Years. For your first search, search all the years at once (the default). If you retrieve too many records, then try single years.
Compensate for errors. The search engine can make 'approximate' searches. With the default setting of 1, for example, the following words would still find 'forest': frest, ofrest, zforest, forets. The 'error(s)' may be an error of omission, addition, or transposition. Changing the default from 1 to 2 will increase your number of hits (and slow down your search somewhat). Changing the default to zero will decrease your number of hits.
Maxrecs. Use the default of 25 for your first search. If you retrieve more than 25 or 50 records, you probably need to refine your search terms (add more characters to your words, change the compensate for errors number to zero, try searching a single year rather than all the years at once.)