Using the Historic Oregon Newspapers Website

Historic Oregon Newspapers supports language-specific searching in English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish (although not all languages are represented at this time). By default, in both Basic and Advanced Search, all content is searched together regardless of language. To limit searches to a specific language, conduct an Advanced Search and choose the appropriate language from the Language drop-down menu. For additional technical information on how languages are encoded and identified for search, see current NDNP Technical Guidelines at http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/guidelines/.

Historic Oregon Newspapers's search engine utilizes language-specific dictionaries to include word variants for your search terms. This is often called "stemming". For example, the search term house, when stemmed, would also return words like houses and housing. In Spanish, words like hermano would include stems such as hermanos. By default, the exact match (unstemmed) results will be ranked higher than the stemmed results.

Other reasons for language-specific search may be more content related. For example, reporting in Spanish about the building of the Panama Canal may convey a different perspective than reporting in the mainstream English-speaking press.