Newspaper Indexing

[Robert Sullivan]

>  We are starting a project and our city computer people said yesterday that
>we could not use Access to index material (it wasn't good enough) and they
>said there is nothing they know of which will do the job we want to load a
>searchable index to the web.

I'll bet they think you can't do it in FoxPro, either.  There are people who
are much more familiar with the technical capabilities of Access than I, so I
won't enter the religious wars.  I'd like to suggest an alternative: static
pages.

Since we don't yet run our own server, we're not at the technical level where
we can mount searchable indexes.  This hasn't stopped me from loading obituary
indexes, censuses, hundreds of pages of Revolutionary and Civil War records,
and the first of decades of city directories.  That's only the local history;
it doesn't include the 30,000 property assessments.  It's low-tech but when
someone types their family name and our county into Altavista, they're quite
likely to get some reference to their ancestors on one of our pages.

Although I generate very basic HTML so it's accessible to users with screen
readers, you can create whatever level of complexity you desire - see the
two-way links between streets and names in my city directory for an example.

<http://www.scpl.org/citydirectories/1841/>

You'll probably want to split your pages by date or alphabetically so they
don't take too long to load - maybe about 60K?  The idea is to have the program
split them automatically so you don't have to edit one large file into parts. 
I think Access should be able to do that.

One other suggestion: add one of the free search engines.  I am in the process
of adding the one from <http://www.picosearch.com> so a user will be able to
find surnames even more easily.

This is just my opinion, but it works for us.  Our local history pages at
<http://www.scpl.org/history> are the most-visited on our site.

Bob Sullivan                               scp_sulli at sals.edu
Schenectady County Public Library (NY)     http://www.scpl.org