Topics
How to find information in the Niupepa: Maori Newspapers collection
There are 3 ways to find information in this collection:
- search for particular words that appear in the text by clicking the Search button
- browse documents by Series by clicking the Series button
- browse documents by Date by clicking the Dates button
Navigation buttons
Different navigation buttons will appear in certain sections of the collection. An explanation of these is given below.
 | Click on a bookshelf icon when browsing the niupepa series to view a list of all the issues in that series |
 | Click on a newspaper icon to read the corresponding niupepa issue |
 | Click on the 'c' icon when browsing a niupepa series to view a commentary of that series |
 | Click on an abstract icon to read English abstracts of the given issue |
 | While viewing a niupepa click the forward arrow to go to the next page |
 | While viewing a niupepa click the back arrow to go to the previous page |
| Open this page in a new window | |
| View fullsize image of this page | |
| View preview image of this page | |
| Highlight search terms | |
| View the english abstract | |
| View the text of this page |
Language preferences
When you click the preferences button at the top of the page you will be able to change some features of the interface to suit your own requirements.
Each collection has a default presentation language, but you can switch to a different language if you like. You can also alter the encoding scheme used by Greenstone for output to the browser -- the software chooses sensible defaults, but with some browsers better visual results can be used by switching to a different encoding scheme. All collections allow you to switch from the standard graphical interface format to a textual one. This is particularly useful for visually impaired users who use large screen fonts or speech synthesizers for output.
Searching
Search terms
Whatever you type into the query box is interpreted as a list of words called "search terms." Each term contains nothing but alphabetic characters and digits. Terms are separated by white space. If any other characters such as punctuation appear, they serve to separate terms just as though they were spaces. And then they are ignored. You can't search for words that include punctuation.
For example, the query
- Agro-forestry in the Pacific Islands: Systems for Sustainability (1993)
will be treated the same as
- Agro forestry in the Pacific Islands Systems for Sustainability 1993
Query type
There are two different kinds of query.
- Queries for all of the words. These look for documents (or
chapters, or titles) that contain all the words you have specified.
Documents that satisfy the query are displayed, in alphabetical
order.
- Queries for some of the words. Just list some terms that are
likely to appear in the documents you are looking for. Documents are
displayed in order of how closely they match the query. When determining
the degree of match,
- the more search terms a document contains, the closer it matches;
- rare terms are more important than common ones;
- short documents match better than long ones.
Use as many search terms as you like--a whole sentence, or even a whole paragraph. If you specify only one term, documents will be ordered by its frequency of occurrence.
Case sensitivity and stemming
Two pairs of buttons on the preferences page control the kind of text matching in the searches that you make. The first set (labeled "case differences") controls whether upper and lower case must match. The second ("word endings") controls whether to ignore word endings or not. It is possible to get a large query box, so that you can easily do paragraph-sized searching. It is surprisingly quick to search for large amounts of text.
For example, if the buttons ignore case differences and ignore word endings are selected, the query
- African building
will be treated the same as
- africa builds
because the uppercase letter in "African" will be transformed to lowercase, and the suffixes "n" and "ing" will be removed from "African" and "building" respectively (also, "s" would be removed from "builds").