Rawson Memorial Library
Helpful Tips Page


Listed below are a couple of tips to help along the way:

  1. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the papers because they are all saved in pdf format. Adobe Acrobat Reader is a free download at www.adobe.com

  2. After opening a newspaper use Ctrl - F to do a keyword search within the PDF file. The word you search for will appear highlighted within the document.

  3. Because the entire issues are very large and take a long time to download, the full version of the paper as well as single page versions are available. If you use the search feature you will most likely find single page versions because of how the search works. The single page versions open much quicker but could cause the second half of an article that is continued on another page to be missing. If this occurs you can easily open the other page by modifing the URL (address) slightly, for example the URL below is for page 1 of the 1-9-1931 issue of the Cass City Chronicle: (example) http://newspapers.rawson.lib.mi.us/chronicle/ccc1931%20(E)/issues/01-09-1931_1.pdf

  4. To see page 2 of the same paper simply change the 1.pdf at the very end of the url to 2.pdf and hit enter, so the new URL would be:
    (example) http://newspapers.rawson.lib.mi.us/chronicle/ccc1931%20(E)/issues/01-09-1931_2.pdf

By doing this you will save time by not needing to search for the next page of a multi-page article.

Manual Browsing

When browsing the papers manually by year, issue, and page, you will open up a window that may look a little confusing at first. The dates and times on the left of the page are the dates that the papers were scanned into the system. The links at the right of each line (in blue) are the important things to look at. For example the 2 lines below come from the Cass City Enterprise window:

Look at the far right, the CCE_1891_A indicates Cass City Enterprise newspapers from the year 1891. Some of the years have an A or B after them, this simply means that the year had to be split into two sections because of its size, if you don't find what your looking for in A, use your back button and go to the B part of the year.

Once you click on a year another window will open with several more links. On this window click on the Issues link (usually bottom right)

You will now see a page with all of the individual issues from that year. In most cases you will see the same date listed several times, the first line will not have a number at the end of it, the rest for that issue will. The numbers represent page numbers within the paper. If you were to click on the link with no number at the end of it you will open the entire issue which will take a very long time (document size is the number to the left of the link). If you want to just look at a specific page click on that link instead and it will open much faster. Here is an example of what you will see:

Using this example if you were to click on the 01-02-1891.pdf link you would open a 16 Megabyte 8 page issue of the 1/2/1891 Cass City Enterprise paper. If instead you clicked on the 01-02-1891_3.pdf link you would open up just page 3 of that paper which is under 2 megabytes in size, still fairly large but obvioulsy much smaller and faster than the full paper.

Simply use your browsers back button to navigate from the papers back to the list of issues or back further to the list of years or eventually to the Home page.

If you experience problems with this page please email librarian@rawsonlibrary.org and describe in detail the problem that is occurring.