| You are subscribed to Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers from the Library of Congress. Exploring the Image ViewerChronicling America is in the process of transitioning from the legacy Chronicling America interface to a new Chronicling America interface and back-end search infrastructure. Read more about it. Through its enhanced search interface, the new Chronicling America offers more options to view and manipulate newspaper pages than the old Chronicling America. The new image viewer offers the same features as the old image viewer but the components are in different locations. This email will focus on exploring the image viewer and tools within the viewer in the new interface only. More information on using the image viewer can be found on "Chronicling America: A Guide for Researchers" under "Download and View Files" and "Images: Clip, Save, and Share." When you perform a search or browse an issue, you will see a list of issues or pages. When you click on any page image, you will be taken to the image viewer. The image viewer allows you to interact with the newspaper page. The first button on the top bar shows the image.
The second button on the top bar shows the image alongside the text. The text is also referred to as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) because that is the automated process through which it is created. OCR is not perfect for historic text. It may be particularly helpful to view the text in case there are errors so you can refine your search terms. More tips about searching OCR can be found on the "Chronicling America: A Guide for Researchers" under "Search Tips."
The third tab shows the PDF of the page. A page selection drop-down menu allows you to go directly to a particular page in the newspaper, which is helpful if there are a lot of pages in an issue, as in this Sunday issue of the Evening Star. You can also navigate between pages using the blue backward and forward arrow buttons. This is helpful when an article is continued onto the next page. You can navigate between pages using the white arrows on either side of the image in the "Image" and "Image with Text" views, but that is not available in the PDF view. You can also navigate between issues using the second set of blue backward and forward arrow buttons or click "All Issues" to be taken to the calendar view of issues.
The "View" menu, will allow you to view a single image, a list of the images (a linear list of the images), a gallery of all the images (larger thumbnails in a grid), grid (smaller thumbnails in a grid), or slideshow (a single page with a strip of page images across the bottom). Each view may be good for different purposes. For example, if you're reading a particular article, "Single image" will provide the best view. If you're browsing a newspaper issue to see which pages contain a particular section, such as the sports section, either gallery or grid may work better.
There are six buttons that appear under the "View" menu. The "Go home" button re-centers the page. The "-" and "+" allow you to zoom out and in. You can also zoom in and out of the image using a mouse or trackpad on your computer. The "Rotate right" button allows you to rotate a page, in the event there is sideways text on a page, for easier reading. The "Toggle full page" button enlarges the viewer to your whole screen, which is helpful for enlarged viewing without too much zooming or for presenting a page, such as in a classroom. Once you are in the "full page" view, this button is replaced with a button to undo the full page. You can also click the "escape" button on your computer keyboard. There are two ways to save an image for future use. The first is the "Download" drop-down menu that only appears in the "Single image" view. You can select which file you'd prefer to download. This will save the whole page image or the whole page of OCRed text.
The second way to save an image is the "Clip Image" tool. An interesting feature of the new image viewer is that it allows you to be more precise in saving an image clip than the old interface. Click on the scissor icon and draw a box around the portion of the page you wish to clip. You will see a "Clip Image" box pop up. Click this box. If you make a mistake, you can click the "X" beside "Clip Image" and redraw your box. You can also use the edges of the clip border to adjust the size of the clip.
You will be taken to a page with the clip and the information about the newspaper title and page where it came from. This page will allow you to print or download the clip and information. Under the image, if you click on "Share" you will be provided with three different links that allow you to share or embed the clip or the full page image in a webpage.
Try out the new image viewer in the Chronicling America interface today!
The Chronicling America historic newspapers online collection is a product of the National Digital Newspapers Program and jointly sponsored by the Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
|
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers: Exploring the Image Viewer
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment