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. How do I report a technical problem?
6. What web browser does the Portal support?
7. Whom can I contact if I notice a mistake or have additional information about an item?
8. Do you have a Glossary?
9. How do I become a Partner?

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 result list?

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?

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?