As promised here are some instructions on using ‘Jackson’s Oxford Journal’ (and 47 other newspapers) online.   You will need a current Oxfordshire library ticket to get in by this method.  Other county library services may have access to the same database, which is provided by a company called Gale.

A. Getting into the Nineteenth Century British Library Newspapers database

1.  Go to the Oxfordshire County Council homepage at www.oxfordshire.gov.uk

2.  In the ‘Leisure and Culture’ section, click on ‘Libraries’.

3.  Click on the ‘Reference Online’ link, either in the left-hand menu or on the heading further down the page.

4.  Click on ‘Times Digital Archive 1785-1985’.

5.  Type the barcode number from your Oxfordshire library ticket (without spaces) into the box and click the ‘Proceed’ button.  This will take you to the list of Gale databases available via Oxfordshire libraries.

6.  Choose the third option, i.e. 19th Century British Library Newspapers.

B. Searching the database

1.  Click on the ‘Advanced Search’ tab.

2.  The default Keyword search isn’t much use.  It is usually better to change this to an ‘Entire document’ search by clicking on the downward arrow next to the box where it says ‘Keyword’ and choosing ‘Entire document(tx)’ from the list.

3.  Type your search term into the first box.  To search for an exact match, put the term inside double quotation marks, e.g. “mary oliver”. 

4.  To narrow down your search results to ‘Jackson’s Oxford Journal’, type ‘oxford’ in the Publication Title box (there’s no need to write out the name in full).

5.  You can also select a date range and/or choose particular parts of the newspaper (e.g. ‘News’ or ‘People’) if you wish.

6.  Then click on the search button (near the top of the form!).

Results are displayed in chronogical order, earliest first, 20 per page.  Click on the red box on the page thumbnail, or on the article title, or on the ‘Article’ link under the result summary, to bring up an image of the article.  The text you searched for should be highlighted in green.  Occasionally it isn’t, in which case you might need to click on ‘Page’ instead of ‘Article’, or you might be dealing with an example of a multi-page scan in which case look for a ‘Next’ button that will take you to the next page in the set.

Beware of misleading headings in results list

Note that when the newspapers were being scanned, someone must have decided which articles were worthy of being scanned and indexed as a single item, and which would be lumped together.  You may get several columns of text all scanned together as if it was a single article, and listed in the results list with only the first heading in that scanned section.  So typically all the local news from the parishes is strung together under the heading of whichever parish happens to be listed first.  Just because an article is headed ‘Wantage’ don’t assume it is only about Wantage … there may be a Finstock or Stonesfield bit later in the same scanned section.

Search tips

There are some useful Search Tips in the online ‘Help’.  If you search for (say) ‘Witney’ and ‘fire’, the system will find all the many pages with both these words.  There’s no guarantee they’ll be in the same article.  If instead you search for ‘Witney n7 fire’ it would search for the word Witney within seven words either side of the word fire.  You can experiment by replacing the number.   You can use various wildcards in your searches too.

Don’t expect perfection!

The scanned images have been made searchable by Optical Character Recognition.  This is rarely perfect even when you start with clearly legible text, so you can imagine that it quite often garbles the old newspapers especially those that are blobby, faint, etc.

Browsing

If you know the date of an issue you can just browse through the pages using the ‘Publication Search’ option. 

Printing/downloading articles

Above the menu bar where it says ‘Basic Search / Advanced Search…’ there’s another menu with options like Download, Print, etc.  I find it best to download images as PDF files.  Then you have more control over the printing.

Even if you don’t find what you were looking for, you are guaranteed to find something of interest!    So happy hunting everyone…