Learn more about Veridian’s search and browse features for digital newspaper collections, designed to help users quickly find, explore, and work with content across large-scale collections.

When digitised newspaper collections can range from thousands to millions of pages, effective search and browsing functionality is essential. Without it, users can easily become overwhelmed by the volume of content and abandon their research altogether. Veridian is designed to ensure content remains accessible, discoverable, and easy to navigate—regardless of collection size.

Most users approach a collection with a topic, name, event, or timeframe in mind. Veridian’s search and browse tools are built to support these research behaviours and help users retrieve relevant information efficiently.

Related reading: Semantic Search vs Keyword Search

Article-level search with METS/ALTO support

One of Veridian’s key strengths is its comprehensive support for searching and browsing METS/ALTO data with article segmentation. When article segmentation is present in the source data, Veridian enables rich article-level functionality, including:

• Searching at the article level rather than just the page level
• Viewing or clipping the text of individual article
• Adding tags or comments to articles
• Saving articles to a private list for later review

These capabilities allow users to work with newspaper content in a much more targeted and meaningful way.

Overview of Veridian’s search and browse features

Full-text indexing

Veridian supports full-text indexing across every word and phrase in a digitised newspaper collection—not just headlines or summaries. Combined with query highlighting and search result summaries, this allows users to quickly assess the relevance of results and navigate directly to matching content.

Search facets and filters

Search facets provide an overview of how results are distributed across available metadata fields. Users can then refine their search by applying filters, which is especially useful when a query returns a large number of results.

Example of filters include: date ranges, names of newspaper publications, city and author.

Search term highlighting

Veridian highlights matched search terms in text snippets, summaries, or directly on the newspaper image itself. This allows users to immediately see where a term appears on the page—saving time and reducing the need to scan entire pages when only a small section is relevant.

Date and title browser

Veridian includes dedicated browsing tools for users who prefer to navigate collections without using keyword search.

• Date browsing allows users to move chronologically through a collection and retrieve specific issues by date.
• Title browsing enables users to explore all available newspaper titles and view all issues for a selected publication.

Downloadable issue-level and page-level PDFs

During the digitisation process, Veridian generates both issue-level and page-level PDFs, which can be made available for download from the live system.

These PDFs provide a convenient way for users to:

• Save copies of newspapers
• Print individual pages or complete issues
• Annotate content for research or presentation purposes
  
  

Advanced search

Veridian’s advanced search tools allow users to refine queries using more precise parameters. Available options vary by collection but may include:

• Date range limits
• Region and language filters
• Title selection
• Content type filtering

Questions about search and browse features?

If you have questions about Veridian’s search and browse functionality—or would like help configuring these features for your collection—contact your Veridian engineer or get in touch with our team. As you can see, the advanced search options provide the most targeted options for users, allowing them to easily find the information within their set parameters.