The Papers Past website is a collection of text items from New Zealand and the Pacific that you can search or browse. It contains millions of pages of material. We've organised the material into five collections - newspapers, magazines and journals, letters and diaries, parliamentary papers and books.
You can switch between them at any time using the banner across the top of each page.
You can find items in Papers Past either by searching for words that appear within the texts, or by browsing to titles/issues/pages/articles using the "Explore by..." page.
Searching lets you enter a term and see results that contain that term. This is a handy way to locate words or names in the material very quickly.
Search tools are on the left-hand side of the collection pages, look for the word "Search".
Browsing is useful if you need to find something specific, like an issue of a newspaper, or a letter from a particular date. This can be more methodical, but it relies on you being able to spot what you’re looking for.
Browse tools are to the right of the search tools, look for the word "Explore". Click on any of the "Explore by..." buttons to manually browse to a title, issue, page or article in the collection.
Searching for keywords is the quickest way to find information about a subject in Papers Past. You can enter numbers, letters, and spaces into the search box, optionally using the date or title filter below the search box and it will try to find results that contain all of those keywords within those dates or titles. For example:
• Mrs J Smith 280 Willis Street
You can choose to search all of the collection at once, or you can set filters to search just a particular part of it. In the case of our newspapers collection, you can also choose to search just the most recent content release we've put online, which will be a range of titles with different date-ranges.
You can also limit your search to just the Ngā Tānga Reo Māori collection. This will limit your search to any titles printed in te reo Māori before 1901. These titles are all listed in the bibliography Books in Māori/Ngā Tānga Reo Māori.
The results you get will have highlighting applied to each word you entered in your query. If you're looking for a particular grouping of words together, have a look at the section below ("Different types of search") and consider either using quotation marks or a proximity search, both detailed below. Each result will contain at least one occurrence of the pattern you've specified, even though each of the words is also highlighted in other places in the article - just look for the bigger clusters of highlighting for your phrase or group. The highlighting on an article can be turned on or off by clicking on the lightbulb icon on the top-right corner of the article image.
Papers Past ignores punctuation and case when you search, so using either of the two terms below will give you identical results:
• mrs j smith
• Mrs J. Smith
Papers Past search uses keywords, so one important thing to keep in mind is that you’ll get the best results by constructing a search term that matches the words that would have appeared in the original material. Context is important.
You might be searching for Donald Henry Jones, but your search will work better if your query terms are written how they would have appeared in a newspaper, or in a letter, or a report – as D Jones, or Mr Jones, or Don Jones, for example.
If you are searching for birth notices or death notices, use words that appeared in those items to surface them in your search results. A good trick is to find similar notices from the same time and place, and look at the language people used for those notices. When you do your search, try adding in some of those keywords as well as the surname.
When you select the search box to type in a query, you can choose from three different types of search:
Choosing this setting allows you to use some boolean operators, like NOT (to remove specific words from your results) or OR, as well as more advanced operators like fuzzy search, proximity search, and character substitutions. By default, you get results that contain all of the words you enter, but it also lets you use a range of boolean search operators in the search box to get very targeted results. Try the techniques listed in the bullet-points below, and experiment with combining them together when you need more specific results.
• mrs j smith
These search terms would give you articles that include the words "mrs", and "j", and "smith". They may or may not be located together - these terms will appear at least once each, anywhere in the item. This is how this search type works by default.
• “Mrs J Smith”
Putting your term in quotes searches for articles containing the exact phrase “Mrs J Smith”. This will only give you results that include this entire EXACT string of characters, including the arrangement of the spaces, so for example an item using the term ‘Mrs Jane Smith’ would not necessarily be included in results where you typed "Mrs J Smith" as a phrase.
• Smith –born
The minus sign EXCLUDES the term that immediately follows it from your results. This is also known as the NOT operator. The example above is a search for articles containing the word "Smith", but it will exclude any results if they also include the word “born”. You can use it multiple times to remove multiple words: eg, 'house -sale -rent'.
• “Mrs J Smith” OR “Mrs l Smith”
OR can be used between any terms or phrases. The example above will give you results if they include either the exact phrase “Mrs J Smith”, or the exact phrase “Mrs I Smith”, but it could also just be used for single words, like 'dogs OR cats'. Type the "OR" in capital letters. If you want to combine OR with other operators, use regular brackets (these) to separate the OR group from the other boolean operators, as in the example below.
• (“Mrs J Smith” OR “Mrs l Smith”) –born
Brackets can be used to group parts of your query. This example will give you results for either phrase, but in either case results containing the word "born" will be excluded.
• Smith~1
Fuzzy search - Using the tilde key (~) followed by the numbers 1 or 2 will give you results for all words within one or two characters of the word “smith” – for example, a search for Smith~1 would include results for smjth or smifh. This is very useful when the computer-generated text recognition isn’t great.
• auc?land
You can use the question-mark as a single-character wildcard, representing any character.
• auckl*d
You can use the asterisk as a multi-character wildcard, representing any characters.
• "biscuit barrel"~6
Proximity search - this gives you results where terms are within a certain number of words of each other. With the example above, results would have those two terms within any six word string. This would also remove results where the words are MORE than six words away from each other. You can use any number, although using a larger number makes it more like just doing an ordinary search for two words.
• (home OR away) century -"rained off" "new zealand batsmen"
This is an example of how you can combine different techniques together to find very specific articles. With this search above, each result contains either the word "home" or "away", it will include the word "century", exclude the exact phrase "rained off", and include the exact phrase "New Zealand batsmen".
This will give you results even if it contains only one of the words you’ve searched for. This is the same as using OR between each search term.
This will look for the exact pattern of characters and spaces you enter. This is the same as entering your search term in “quotation marks” using the “all of these words” search option above.
You can choose to limit your search to a particular date range. All the collections can be searched by date. On the normal desktop or landscape view of the site, the date and title filters are directly under the search box, on the left. After you've entered your dates/titles/etc, and your search term, press the green "search" button.
Other filters are specific to particular collections, so you will only see them on some search pages.
A search-related question we sometimes get is "how do I filter dates or titles?" - these tools will disappear if the screen is too heavily zoomed or if you use a small screen in portrait mode. Switching to landscape view or un-zooming the page a little will help solve this, or load the desktop version of the page from your mobile browser's menu.
After performing a search you can choose to sort the results in different ways. You can choose to sort by "Relevance", which works best when your search consists of multiple terms or boolean operators. You can sort by "Date", from oldest to newest or vice-versa - this is very handy when trying to look at something chronologically, like a ship journey reported port-by-port across different newspapers. You can sort by "Article title", which is alphabetically or reverse-alphabetically, and is based on the title of the article. You can sort by "Title", which orders the content by the title of the newspaper the articles come from, either from A-Z or Z-A. Lastly, you can also sort by content type, which also A-Z or Z-A, and it groups content into Advertisements, Articles, and Illustration captions.
The best approach to take when locating information using search is to be methodical – it can be helpful to start by using the broadest possible search term. For example:
• If you’re looking for a person, maybe start by searching only for their surname, to establish how many potential results that name might appear in.
• Then, examine the results you got, and consider how you might want to remove the irrelevant stuff. This might mean repeating the search but with a date filter applied, or by using one of the boolean techniques above, or adding in a distinct keyword that relates to that person. Make single changes at a time, rather than all-at-once. The thumbnail previews of your list of search results is a very helpful way to assess the relevance of results quickly.
• Scan the results from the second search, and also compare the number of results to your first search – this will give you a sense of whether you are getting closer to what you’re looking for, or if you should try a different approach.
• It might help to sort the list of results you get in different ways to help identify the items you’re interested in. The sort options are in the grey bar at the top of your search results. For example, sorting by date is a useful way to see events over time, whereas “best match” is useful if you’re using multiple terms or a boolean search.
• If you're using the boolean search tricks of the "Any of these words" setting, for example, the INCLUDE/EXCLUDE functions of the +/- characters, you might also sometimes accidentally exclude relevant results without intending to. A good time to use those boolean approaches is when you're trying to dig through a really huge pool of results to simply confirm whether or not something appeared in a paper, but you may need to be more careful with those boolean terms if you are trying to find EVERY instance of a particular thing that appeared in a paper.
Sometimes you need to browse to a particular page or issue, or a specific publication title. Papers Past has pages for each of the collections that help you do this — these give you a browsable or sortable list of that collection's content.
• Explore Newspapers
• Explore Magazines & Journals
• Explore Letters & Diaries
• Explore Parliamentary Papers
• Browse Books
Because the material in each collection is different, the ways you can browse are tailored, to suit that material. For example, newspapers can be specific to regions, whereas parliamentary papers are not.
You may also want to check out our Collection Statistics page for an overview of the collections on the site.
This website uses responsive design, so if a small screen is used to view the site, a mobile-friendly view is served which is designed to fit the narrower screen width. If you switch to a landscape view by rotating your screen, you will get a version which can fit more of the full desktop features of the site, like the search filters, which normally disappear on a narrower screen.
Also note that if you magnify the screen a lot, it will start to trigger the mobile view, even if you are on a desktop device.
You can print copies of articles using the print shortcut, this is just above and to the right of an article - look for the printer icon.
Papers Past also lets you save PDFs of entire newspaper issues, or lets you save PDFs or high-resolution copies of whole pages.
To save or to print a whole page or issue, use the "breadcrumb trail" above the item you're looking at, near the top just under the four collections links. This lets you navigate directly to the issue or page you are interested in - click on the page or date in the breadcrumb trail, and the links for saving a high-res image, PDF, or printing, will appear in the top-right just above the item you've chosen.
It's worth noting that different browsers produce different print results - some have better defaults than others, so if you notice print layout issues the two most common quick fixes are:
• print using a different browser
• try adjusting the print scaling slightly
The search settings you choose are stored in the Papers Past session cookie in your browser. This includes things like your preference for how many articles you see per page of results (eg, 10, 25, 50, or 100), or for how the results are sorted.
When you’ve arrived at an article item, you can find other useful tools and related information on the page around it.
• You can enable/disable search term highlighting using the lightbulb icon in the top-right corner of the article image.
• You can switch between views of the image, the text, or research information for referencing the item using the three tabs just above the article.
• You can see usage/copyright information under "Using this item" next to the article.
• There is a search box, on the top left of the page, which can search either the whole collection or just the issue or report your item is part of.
• To the right of the search button, across the top, there’s a breadcrumb trail which you can use to navigate the collection you're viewing. For example: newspapers > the newspaper title > the issue of the newspaper > the whole page > the article you’re viewing. This is very handy if you're viewing an item which is only partially displaying - for example, if a newspaper article seems to be cut-off part-way through, use the breadcrumb trail to select the page containing that article, so that you can view the whole page and find the rest of the information you were looking for.
Don't be shy about clicking around on things on screen to see what you can find, you can always get in touch with us if you have any questions.
If you're a software developer and having difficulties accessing Papers Past content via the DigitalNZ API, please get in touch and we'll help. We use a tool called Imperva and sometimes it accidentally blocks non-malicious traffic. If you see an Imperva message when you expect to be seeing content, email us a screenshot of the message and we'll sort it out for you. If you do use automated tools to access content on Papers Past, we recommend using non-headless setups so that you can collect all of the output of any event codes and messages from Imperva. This would help us diagnose and potentially whitelist your tools.
Please don't hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any questions or comments, or suggestions for digitisation. Your feedback helps us improve the site and these collections.