Tutorial for searching in old Hong Kong newspapers using the Internet Archive

1. Introduction

On Gwulo, searching for any subject in old Hong Kong newspapers relies on the Hong Kong Public Library online access (MMIS) (https://mmis.hkpl.gov.hk/web/guest/advanced-search).

2. Internet Archive use

There is a much more convenient way for searching: it is the Internet Archive. Just use the link below:

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine (1)

Type in the item you are searching for (do not use Wayback Machine but the search field below). As an example “Yee Sang Fat” is used – type in the item between brackets, otherwise the program will search for all individual words. Select “Search text contents”

Then press GO and wait a few seconds. The result is (2):

The archive found 3.644 entries which is a lot. Fortunately, there are sorting functions (“Relevance” is the default setting)

If you choose “Title”, you get in this example all entries in the “China Mail”, next all in “Hong Kong Daily Press”, then “Hong Kong Sunday Herald”, and so on.

If you choose “Date published”, the entries appear in chronological order – unfortunately from young to old. Haven’t found out how to change from descending to ascending.

You can additionally apply filters using the button on the left.

Most helpful is likely the “year issued” function (1). Click on the double-arrow to enlarge and choose a range, in this example 1905-1910. This is done by moving the blue columns with your computer mouse (2).

In this example, the number of entries is reduced to 145. Choose one of the titles shown and click on it. The program automatically jumps to the item chosen (1), you can enlarge it using the Zoom-in button (2).

Very fortunately, the item searched for is highlighted, and additionally the text is transcribed using an OCR program (displayed on the left). This is machine transcribing only, it often pretty poor in quality, but it helps.

If desired, the complete newspaper issue can be downloaded as pdf file by clicking on the download button on the very left (3). 

3. Comparison with MMIS

The Internet Archive search has many advantages over MMIS.

• In this example, “Yee Sang Fat” gave 3.644 hits, on MMIS there were 4 (in words: four)!
  [I think the reason is that the Internet Archive transcribes the whole text using an OCR software while MMIS uses (manually added) tags only].
• The internet archive is minimum ten times faster.
• The item of interest is highlighted in the Internet Archive search, on MMIS you need to find it.
• The text around your item of interest is transcribed with an OCR software, sometimes in poor quality only (depends on the quality and resolution of the newspaper archived).

Only one feature doesn’t work: the search for a newspaper of a specific date. This works on MMIS only.

ADDENDUM: Internet Archive also searches in journals and books.