Sign up to meet with me!
Think of the terminology of time period you are searching in. Try to use the terms that were used at the time. They may be offensive terms. Brainstorm synonyms or alternatives to the terms you would search today.
Due to the way newspapers are constructed, words may be chopped up by a line break. Also, if the OCR process wasn't high quality, words may be misinterpreted or misspelled. Try searching for parts of words instead of the whole word.
When searching for people, watch for initials, abbreviations, nicknames and women referred to with a husband's name. Sometimes newspapers used people's first initials instead of their full first name. Other times, people may have used their nickname, e.g., Liz for Elizabeth, instead of their full name. Lastly, married women were often referred to as Mrs. X, where the X is their married last name. Try searching for just the last name and then progressively filtering with an initial, nickname, or Mrs.
Do you know the exact article you are looking for? This is a known item search. You should use all of the bibliographic (citation) information available to you to get started. Begin with the 'container' which newspaper was it published in? Go to an archive of that newspaper and begin searching. Do you know the author's name? Search first for the author, then try the title of the article. If you don't know which newspaper it was published in, you can ask what or who is the article about? Where did they live? What are the local papers in that area? or if you know only the author, you can search for them on the web and see if you can find a biography to learn where they worked.
Are you just trying to see if there are any articles on a topic or about a person or organization? This is an exploratory search. You should check out the things to consider box on this page and begin by building a list of keywords related to the topic, person or organization of interest. In the case of the CMU police, you may start with terms like Police, Officer, Campus Security, Campus Safety, the Names of former officers or chiefs, etc. If you are looking for a specific event or incident, try listing out words related to that event.
Are you searching for anything within a specific publication? If you are scouring a specific newspaper or publication for anything related to a broad topic, you should start by listing out all possible terms or items that you want to find. Similar to example 2 above. If you know there are specific people who write about policing or are on the 'police beat' as they say, then you can also search for all of the articles written by those reporters.
Are you searching across multiple publications for a specific topic? If you have a specific topic, e.g., incidents of stop and frisk on CMU campus, then you should create a very detailed listing of terms and synonyms related to the topic and then use these to search in every newspaper or publication available.
The files are OCR'd so you can do a full text search in the document view. The full text Ctrl F search also works if you have downloaded the PDF and have opened it in Acrobat or another PDF tool. The full text search does not work for a PDF in the browser. For tips on full text searching using keywords, check out the box to the right about general search tips.
A good approach may be to start with specific time periods that you know the University was making decisions about the police department or periods of time around specific incidents and events. For regular business and discussions that weren't a reaction to an event, you should probably read at least one year previous to the decision since academic decisions tend to be slow and deliberated for many months before a final decision is announced. For the specific time periods of interest, it may be best to just download and skim the minutes to get the full picture of what they were discussing at the time.
Pittsburgh has several major newspapers and a few more local ones. The major daily newspapers are The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Pittsburgh Tribune Review. The Pittsburgh Courier and The Pittsburgh City Paper are the main local weekly papers. Public Source is a newer, independent digital only site focusing on investigative pieces about the region.
There are two main ways to add content to Zotero: Manually entering the citation information and links and Adding them automatically via a PDF file. You can use a browser plug in to add a news article directly to the database for some resources. For historical resources that have been scanned, you may need to add them manually or download a PDF and then upload it to Zotero.
For Tartan articles:
*** Although the DOI provided is for the whole issue, you can add the page numbers for the specific article into your citation to ensure readers can find the right article.
The screenshot below is an example of the metadata collected by Zotero. It can be automatically captured by the system or you can modify it. The very first item, Item Type is set to Newspaper Article. There are many types of items so make sure you select Newspaper Article before you begin adding information. Several of you have already started adding details like the section of the paper the article appears in and the specific pages the article appears on. This is great information to a reader to be able to get back to the article!
EXAMPLE CITATION from metadata above using Chicago Style (see section below for exporting):
Gibney, Shannon. 1996. “Rape Victims Share Their Experiences to Help Others.” The Tartan, January 29, 1996, Vol. 90, No. 14 edition, sec. University Living. CMU Digital Collection. http://doi.library.cmu.edu/10.1184/pmc/TAR/TAR_1996_090_014_01291996/TAR_1996_090_014_01291996.
Adding DOIs to citations:
Here is an example of a citation exported from the course Zotero Library. In order to get the DOI to appear at the end of the citation, you need to go to the 'Cite' settings and select the check box at the bottom to Include URLs of paper articles in references. This will ensure that any DOI or other link will be added to the citations that Zotero generates for you. The screenshot below shows the Cite settings dialog box.
Select the resource/item, right click on it and choose Create Bibliography from Item.
Next, choose the citation style you want to use. Unless you are exporting the whole library, it is best to choose Copy to Clipboard. Once you click OK, then you can Ctrl-P to paste the citation where ever you want to use it.
