How To Search
Accessible Archives

Accessible Archives offers the full-texts to thousands of magazine articles, newspaper articles, speeches, and documents from Godey's Ladys Book 1830-1880, The Pennsylvannia Gazette, 1728-1800, The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective, 1860-1865, African-American Newspapers: The Nineteenth Century, The Pennsylvania Newspaper Record, 1819-1870, The Pennsylvania Geneaological Catalogue, Chester Country 1809-1870. The content encompasses subjects such as warfare, fine arts, communication, language, fashion, music, interior design, warfare, and politics.

Getting Started

>Click the gold "Search" tab at the top left of the screen.

Keyword Searching

Check mark the databases that you want to search before hitting the search button.

> Connect words with AND to find texts that contain both words.
Example: Lee and Gettysburg finds an article that contains both Lee and Gettysburg.

> Connect words with OR to find texts that contain either word.
Example: Partisans or guerillias finds an article that contains either.

> Connect words with AND NOT to find texts that contain one word but not the other.
Example: finds an article about but not radio.

> Connect words with NEAR to find texts that contain words next to each other.
Example: women near voting finds articles with women and voting near each other.

> Phrase Searching: Enclose words in quotation marks to find an exact phrase.
Example: "Civil War"

> Truncation: Use an * to find variants of a word.
Example: war* will find articles that contain "war", "wars", and "warfare"

> Combining the Search Methods: If necessary, use parentheses to organize the search.
Example: Jackson and (campaign or election) finds an article that contains Jackson and either campaign or election.

Subject Searching

Subject searching finds texts that match the meaning, not the exact wording of your search. To use subject searching, type in $contents and then your search. Subject searching uses natural language; you do not have to rephrase search according to AND, OR, NOT, NEAR.

$content How did the North win the Civil War?

This example finds any texts dealing with the reasons for the North’s victory in the Civil War even if the texts do not have the exact words "North", "Win", or "Civil War".

Relevancy Searching

Relevancy searching allows you to search for keywords and rank the results of the search by relevancy. Items at the top of the search results are the most results. To use relevancy searching, simply connect keywords with commas.

Example: Technology, innovation, warfare finds texts that are most pertinent to these keywords, listing the most relevant texts at the top of the results list.

Printing, Saving, or Emailing

Simply click the "Print" button at the top of the page on your browser bar to print a document.

Emailing is not currently available, but users can paste documents into an email text. Then, users can email the text to themselves.

Help

 > Ask a librarian at the Information Desk in one of the campus libraries.
> Call the Libraries at (205) 348-6047