Research with WCU Student Newsapers

WCU Digital Collections, part of Special Collections at FHG Library, hosts a variety of digital collections for primary research.  Digitized versions of West Chester Student Newspapers are available covering the period from Feb 1 1892 through April 18 2011.  

West Chester University Student Newspapers allows you to browse by issues, but most researchers will prefer to search vs browse.  A box for searching appears at the top of the page, allowing you to search for a word or an exact phrase across all the issues.  

Beneath the search form, a link to “Advanced Search” allows you to search more specifically. Click on Advanced Search

1. Begin by clicking on “Select All Collections” to deselect that option.  An advanced search across everything, everywhere might be less helpful.  
2. Then click on “Show All” and scroll down to find and select “West Chester University Student Newspapers” and click “Save”.
3. Next, enter your search terms. You can use fancy boolean logic for a fantastically specific search.  Note the distinction between searching for all of the words, any of the words, and an exact phrase. Add rows as needed to increase your specificity. 
4. Below that, you can specify the date range. 
5. At the end, click “search” to show your results.  By default, search results are ordered by date with the oldest dates first.  

1. Each issue (date) appears separately in the search results.  Click an issue to see what your search has returned.  
2. Clicking on an issue shows the issue divided into a series of pages, scrollable on the right side of the screen.  Pages that match your search terms are identified and the search terms highlighted.  

1. Click on the icon at the top of the page image to make the page full screen and read the articles.  

1. Beneath the page image is a transcript of that page.  Open the transcript to read the text, if you’d prefer.  You can do a quick search of the transcript itself by using control-f (or command-f if you’re on a mac). 

Selecting an item for research from the newspapers

Find something?  Here’s what you need for each found item in the newspapers:

1. The title of the article.  That’s going to be the NAME of the item.  
2. The author of the article.  Lots of articles don’t have attributed authors.  
3. The date of the article.  
4. The pages for the article.  
5. The transcript of the article (use copy and paste, selecting only the transcript of the article’s text). 
6. The image(s) of the article page(s).  Use the download button (top right of the page results, selecting “Large” as the size. Save the image to your machine and name the image(s) the date of the newspaper and the page number as follows 02-01-1892-page1.jpg