The Immigration and Citizenship Thesaurus for Chronicling America: How it can help search Ohio Memory

Ohio Memory was created in 2000 as a collaborative statewide digital library to provide access to digital content from all over the state to anyone and everyone. One of the main focuses of this endeavor has been to provide continued access to Ohio’s historic newspapers by including them on Ohio Memory and ensuring they are keyword searchable. On a national level, Chronicling America has been focused on the same goal: Providing digital access to the nation’s newspapers. Ohio has been a proud partner of Chronicling America and will have added over 600,000 pages of content by the completion of the current grant cycle.

Providing digital access is just one part of the puzzle to making history accessible, creating resources that help people search through digital content is also necessary to ensure resources are being used effectively. The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) has recognized the need to create more robust resources, particularly for students, to help them utilize the many thousands of newspaper pages available on Chronicling America.

In order to address this, many NDNP partners have joined together to create thesauri. These thesauri have been created to provide students with additional context to historical terms used in newspapers that are no longer accepted or in the common lexicon so they can use keyword searches as effectively as possible. The most recent inclusion of the thesauri is the Immigration and Citizenship Keyword Thesaurus for Chronicling America.

Ohio, in partnership with other NDNP state partners, helped craft this resource, which serves as a guide to searching topics of people’s voluntary and involuntary movement in Chronicling America, including lists of words used in the past that may help produce more results, as well as strategies for navigating the database. The thesaurus was created to help students with searching, but also as a resource to remind them that historical newspapers, like all primary documents from the past, use the language of the time they were written, which may include terms considered offensive today. While efforts have been made to include and increase the ethnic press content in Chronicling America, most of the newspapers currently in the database are English-language and produced by white publishers and editors. The current iteration of the Thesaurus is intended to primarily assist researchers in identifying terms on immigration in the English-language press. Students and researchers can use the thesaurus to help guide them on accurate search terminology, but should be mindful that immigration does not exist independently but intersects with other aspects of society like community size, class, and gender, and utilizing other thesauri such as the Race and Ethnicity Keyword Thesaurus for Chronicling America can be an additional aid and context when navigating Chronicling America.

Much of the NDNP thesaurus work done to help students search Chronicling America, can also extend to helping students search other digital resources, such as Ohio Memory. We hope this blog has helped illuminate some resources that can help everyone search historic newspaper content!

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Thank you to Lauren Kennedy, Digital Projects Coordinator at the Ohio History Connection, for this week’s post!