You can search The Archive using key words such as name, place, event, or one or more random terms. You can also refine your search further:
Use quotation marks to search using an exact word. For example: dog will give you all of the words in which dog appears (dogs, doggerel, dogger). But “dog” will only give you the exact matches.
Use quotation marks to search using an exact group of words. For example: "free vote" or “la belgique independante”.
Use + or - to make a word mandatory (with +), or to exclude it (with -). For example: +market -silver will search for text excerpts in which market appears, but not silver.
Filters
You can also refine your search using the filters:
Type: filter by document, by blog or by collection.
Subject: filter by subjects linked to the Abraham newspaper catalogue.
Publication date: filter by publication date.
Series or title: filter by newspaper series or newspaper title.
Genre: filter by printed, typed or hand-written documents.
Language: filter by the language in which the document is written.
Provider: filter by provider of the archive material.
Important to Know: Your Search Results
When searching, the system will make an estimate of relevance for you. The results that the system considers to match your search most closely are listed first. You can change the order (for example, by date or alphabetically) with the aid of the dropdown on the right over the search results.
All printed papers are searchable by text, thanks to Optical Character Recognition(OCR). OCR ensures the automatic conversion of printed letters into digitally readable form. Please note: occasionally you may see some strange symbols appear in your search results. This is because OCR sometimes has difficulty correctly identifying characters. There is a possibility that words will not be recognised correctly. Therefore, when searching, you may have different results than expected.
Caution: Hand-written texts cannot be read by OCR. You will not be able to search these by text.