HIST 3442: American Migrant Cities

Many historical documents that have been digitized have undergone OCR, or optical character recognition, a process where the images of the text have been transcribed to make them keyword searchable. This process captures the words as they appeared, including outdated anglicisations or racist terms that we would no longer use today. 

Including such terms when conducting keyword searches of newspaper or other primary source databases can expand the number of results for your search. For instance, if you are searching for references to Beijing, you may want to also search for Peking. 

Whether you are searching for primary or secondary sources, it is important to use search terms that will generate results. We use subject headings in the library catalog--a controlled list of terms used to collocate results. Some subject headings that you may find useful are: 

Cities and towns -- Growth
Citizenship
Emigration and immigration
Illegal aliens [note: this term is no longer used by the Library of Congress, but may still appear in some library records]
Immigrants
Migration, internal
Naturalization
Noncitizens
Rural-urban migration
Urbanization

Like any online search, it's important to use the right keywords when searching for primary sources. While "primary sources" is the term that we use in class, it is often not the term used on the websites where libraries and museums share their digitized items. 

Other search terms to try might include: 

You might also find it helpful to search for specific formats. This can be particularly helpful when doing an image search.

Adapted from Robin M. Katz, "How to Google for Primary Sources."