FAQs

General Questions

  1. What is the Portal?
  2. What is in the Portal?
  3. Can you tell me the value of an item in my collection?
  4. Why did I get an error message?
  5. What web browser does the Portal support?
  6. How do I report a technical problem?
  7. Whom can I contact if I notice a mistake or have additional information about an item?
  8. How do I become a Partner?
  9. Do you have a Glossary?

For Genealogists

  1. How do I find census records?
  2. Can I search using Soundex?
  3. Do you index names?

Citations

  1. What citation format do you use?

Searching

  1. When I enter a keyword in Basic Search, what is being searched?
  2. How do I use Advanced Search?
  3. OCR: what is it and how does it affect my search?
  4. How do I clear a search dialog box?
  5. Why didn't my search results list include plurals?
  6. Can I search within a search results list?
  7. Can I save a list of search results?
  8. Why isn't my county shown in the categories on the left-hand side of the screen?

Exploring

  1. How is Exploring different from Searching?
  2. Can I search within an Explore grouping?
  3. Why do the date ranges in Explore by Dates overlap?

Selecting and Viewing Items

  1. How do I locate page hits?
  2. How do I view the pages of a book?
  3. When viewing text items, sometimes the keywords are highlighted in yellow and sometimes they are not highlighted. Why is that?

Rights and Permissions

  1. What are the rules for using items in the Portal?

Usage Statistics

  1. Do you collect data for reporting on collection use?
  2. Where can I find the "statistics" pages?
  3. How do you define "use"?
  4. How is a use different from a hit or visit?
  5. Can you tell what country users are coming from?

Saving / Printing / E-mailing

  1. How do I bookmark an item?
  2. How do I print an item record or image?
  3. How do I save an item record or image?
  4. How do I find out which institution (Partner) holds the original item?
  5. How can I get a copy of an entire document, book, or map?
  6. Can I "zoom in" on a portion of a newspaper and then print just that portion?
  7. How do I get a printed photo or a high quality digital copy of the image?
  8. How do I e-mail an item record or image?
  9. Can I e-mail a list of search results?
  10. Do you have persistent links to items?
  11. Do you offer RSS?

Programmatic Access

  1. Do you have any APIs for your system?
  2. Do your APIs require a login or access key?
  3. Are the records available via OAI-PMH?