Virtual Library of Historical Press Help

Index:

Using the search function

The Virtual Library of Historical Press website search function has four different search systems. You will need to use one of them in order to access the digitized press copies. All four are very easy to use. They are described below.

Simple search:

The "Simple search" search system consists of nine fields, which you can use to locate the desired publication. The more fields you fill in, the closer the search will be to what you are looking for.

Any field: this field allows you to search for a publication by entering any keyword you suppose must be included in the document description file: editor's name, title or any word from the title, city where it was printed, etc.

Title: you can fill in this field to search for a publication using the title or a keyword in the title.

Community: you can use this drop-down menu to choose the Spanish Autonomous Community in which you know the newspaper or magazine you are looking for was published. You can use this field on its own to search for all the publications printed in a given Community.

Province: this works exactly the same as the Community field, but displays Spanish provinces instead.

Town: this field works the same way. Here you can enter the name of the town where the publication you are looking for was published, using the options that appear in the drop-down menu.

Publication language: you can use this drop-down menu to specify the language in which the document you are searching for is written. You can also use it to search for all the documents published in a given language.

Publication date (dd/mm/yyyy): in this field you can specify the date on which the document you are searching for was published, or search for all the publications that were published on a given date. If you do not know the specific date of a publication, you can also specify a period of time between two dates during which it may have been published.

Advanced search:

The "Advanced search" allows you to carry out searches using various fields, with the added advantage that you can choose these fields from a drop-down menu. In addition, you can select AND/OR/NOT from another drop-down menu to fine tune the search and specify whether or not you want copies that fulfil the condition of the selected field to be displayed. In other words, you can use this search function to request, for example, to display all periodicals that contain the word "católico" in their title, but not ones published in Soria.

The "Advanced search" function also contains other fields in addition to those that already appeared in the "Simple search": Publisher/printer, Place of publication, Notes and Periodicity.

Publisher/printer: allows you to search using the name of the publication publisher, printing press or printer. You can choose the "NOT" option to exclude from the results all publications published or printed by a given publisher or printer.

Place of publication: You can also search according to the place where the document you are searching for was published, or you can search for all the documents published in a given place.

Notes: you can search according to the words contained in the "notes" field of the document's descriptive sheet, or specify that you do not want to search publications containing those words.

Periodicity: in this field you can search according to the periodicity of the publication you are searching for (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). You can also search for all the publications that have a given periodicity.

Search by dates:

The third option, "Search by dates", allows you to search for publications that were published on a given date or, if you are not sure of the exact date, you can also search within a period of time, which you must specify between one date and another.

All the dates you enter in the relevant field must include the day, month and year (in 23/10/1895 format, including the slashes). By doing so, the results you obtain will include all the publications issued on that date or within the specified period of time.

List of titles:

Finally, the Virtual Library of Historical Press search function allows you to search for the desired publication with the help of an alphabetical index. To use it, simply select the initial of the publication you are looking for from the alphabetical menu at the top of the page. Next, a list will appear with all the publications whose title begins with the selected letter.

List of towns:

Last of all, you can use a list of the various towns where the documents in the Virtual Library of Historic Press catalogue were published to find the desired publication. In this list, you must select the Autonomous Community and then the Province and the capital city where the publication you are searching for was published. Then a list will appear with all the documents published in that city.

Search results

Once you have entered the search criteria, the results will be displayed in the form of a list of all the documents that comply with the conditions established in the search.

This list contains the title of the publication, the year in which it was first published and the city where it was printed. The year may appear as (18??), which means that the Virtual Library of Historical Press does not have the first issue of the publication available, but supposes that it appeared in the 19th century.

In this window, you can export the file of the publication you found (you can also do this in the next window). To do so, there are several export options available. You can export in different formats, as you can see in the image. It is also possible to use different character sets.

Next, you can click with the mouse pointer on the title of the publication to display its description file. This file contains all the available information relating to the publication: designation number, title, printer's name and place where it was printed, etc. It can be viewed in several formats: File, ISBD, Dublin Core, Tagged Ibermarc and XML MARC. To change the format, simply select it from the drop-down menu and click on "Change".

At the bottom of the file you will see that it says "Digital copy". Click here to access another screen that shows the years that the publication spanned and are available in the Virtual Library of Historical Press.

Here you can select the year when the issue you want to view appears. When you click on the year, you will be taken to a screen that shows the months in that year for which digital copies of issues are available.

Once you have selected a month, you will be shown a list of the issues available for that month. Then click on the "JPEG images" command next to the issue you want to view, and a new window will open with thumbnails of the digitized issue.

Viewing the found documents

The thumbnail page:

Once you have reached the screen with the thumbnails of the pages of the digitized issue, you can select which of them you want to see enlarged. To do so, simply use the mouse cursor to click on the thumbnail of the desired page. The thumbnail page also has four options, which are represented by icons placed above the thumbnails.

You can use this icon to display the issue in enlarged page view, without using the thumbnails.

This icon takes you back to the thumbnail page.

This icon shows the images in a list format.

Finally, this icon allows you to export the information about the publication in METS format.

Likewise, on the same page showing the thumbnails of each page in the issue, you can save the images directly to a disk. To do so, simply click where it says "Save", below each thumbnail.

Enlarged view of the images:

As mentioned above, to access the enlarged images, you simply need to click on the thumbnail you want to enlarge. Next, you will be taken to a screen that is split into two parts. The left-hand side contains a small box with the thumbnail of the page. In addition to the thumbnail, this box contains several numbers, which refer on the one hand to the zoom percentage you wish to apply to the image and, on the other hand, to the size of the area of the image to which you want the zoom to be applied. You can increase the zoom on a specific area you want to see in more detail, or you can increase the area to which the zoom is applied until it covers the entire page. To change the zoom values and the size of the area to which the zoom is to be applied, simply enter the desired values in the relevant fields.

The right-hand side contains the enlarged view of the page following the criteria entered in the aforementioned fields.

The image-viewing page contains another four icons (in addition to the four mentioned above).

The first of such icons allows you to enlarge the image slightly until the characters become visible. Once it has been enlarged, the icon changes to display a minus sign (-) over the magnifying glass. You can click on it to return to the original image.

The second and third icons allow you to turn the image clockwise or anticlockwise at ninety-degree angles.

This other icon allows you to save the image of the page to a disk in JPEG format.

Finally, below the image of the selected page, you will find two arrows that allow you to scroll through the issue, skipping from page to page. In addition, the top of the image-viewing screen also contains a function to skip directly to a given page in the issue. To use this function, simply enter the desired page number in the field and press "Enter" or click where it says "Go" using the mouse.

The Virtual Library of Historical Press also allows the images to be viewed in another format. If you look at the top right-hand side of the screen, you will see some text suggesting that you try the other viewing format. To do so, simply click on the word "viewing" to access it.

If you want to use this viewing mode, you must have a JAVA application installed. If this is not the case, when you click on "viewing", a pop-up window will ask if you want to install JAVA. Once the application has been installed, you will be able to access the new viewing mode without any problems.

This viewing mode has several functions:

Fit: this button restores the original view, fitting the page to the screen.

1:1: this button allows you to see the image in its real size.

Zoom in: this button allows you to zoom in and see the image enlarged. You can press it until the image is enlarged by more than 150%.

Zoom out: this reduces the zoom to see a smaller image. Â Likewise, you can enter a specific zoom percentage in the relevant field. In this way, you can see the image at the exact size you want. To do so, simply enter the desired percentage and press "Enter".

Turn: this allows you to turn the image ninety degrees at a time.

Brightness (+): this allows you to change the view of the image, by increasing the brightness.

Brightness (-): this allows you to reduce the brightness of the image.

Negative: converts the image to negative.

These are all the search and display functions that the Virtual Library of Historical Press has to offer. We hope you have found this guide to be useful.