Frequently Asked Questions

I receive an error message when I try to open a document or the document just does not open. What can I do?

If your browser is trying to open the document within a browser window, you may want to try right-clicking on the document link and saving the file to your computer. Once you have downloaded the document, double click on the PDF icon to open in Acrobat Reader and enter your search terms. Sometimes the full application (instead of the browser plug-in) is better able to open a specific document. If you continue to have problems opening the file, please contact us with the document filename and the text of the error message if available.

When I open a document, the search within the PDF returns no results. What can I do?

Adobe Reader sometimes has problems searching large or complex documents. You can try refreshing the page to see if the results are displayed, or you can click on the the New Search button and repeat your search. You can also click on your browser's back button, refresh the page and then try opening the PDF again. The last resort is to right-click on the document link and save the file to your computer. Once you have downloaded the document, double click on the PDF icon to open in Acrobat Reader and enter your search terms.

When I open a document, the search appears to be stuck. What can I do?

Adobe Reader sometimes has problems searching large or complex documents. You can either Stop the search and then re-type your search in Adobe Reader's Find box, or you can close Adobe Reader and download the document again.

The search does not transfer to Acrobat X on my Mac, why not?

Adobe removed the remote searching feature in Acrobat X that allows us to send the search terms to the document via a web address. What this means is that you will have to perform your search a second time within the PDF. Open the search box by typing Command+F. If you copy your search from the search box on the web site and then paste it into the search box in Acrobat X, you will be taken to the page where the first search term is found.

I know the Times was printed on a specific date, but I cannot find it. How can I find that date's paper?

Unfortunately, the papers that are included in this archive are all that we have for this time period. It is possible that the Historical Society of Carroll County may have the specific paper or article that you need.

I see a lot of gibberish in some of the entries, what is that?

Since we were scanning well-used microfilm, the quality of some of the print was difficult for the digital scanners to decipher. The software took its best guess at what it was seeing and saved this within the document for searching. Unfortunately, with millions of words of text in all of these newspapers, we cannot go back and correct all of these problems.

When I perform my search I get thousands of results. How can I narrow this down?

This archive searches the full text of the newspapers. With this in mind, it is very important to be as precise as possible with your search. You may want to try an Advanced Search to help narrow down your results. If you know the specific paper that you need, you can perform an advanced search and enter the date of the paper as a search term (note that the date must be entered as mm-dd-yyyy or 05-15-1967).