A Primer on Using Online Colonial Spanish Documentary
Resources
John E. Worth
The following guides are provided as primers for
first-time users of several important online search engines with available online imagery of
original documents relative to the Spanish colonial period. Please contact
me if they become out-of-date, since these sites are prone to occasional changes
or updates that I may not be aware of immediately.
Archivo General de Indias
(AGI), Seville, Spain
1. Begin with the main page of the
Portal de Archivos Españoles (PARES).
2. Click on "Busqueda Avanzada" in the central menu.
3. Click on the drop-down menu under the second category
heading, entitled "Filtrar por Archivo;" choose "Archivo General de
Indias" and then wait for the form to re-load. Next choose one of
the following two options, under steps 4 or 5.
4. If you want to perform a simple search using keywords,
follow the steps below:
Enter keywords in the top box entitled "Buscar"
with spaces in-between each keyword. HINTS: use only two or
three keywords at most to get best results; for names, remove all
prepositions such as "de" or "y" from the name, entering only the
main first and last names separated by a space; and don't forget to try all possible
spellings (modern and antiquated) for any given name or placename or
item, since the index entries are often based on original spellings,
which varied considerably from one document to the next, or from one
time period to the next (i.e. Pensacola, Pansacola, Panzacola,
etc.).
To limit the results to a specific date range,
enter those dates (full years only) in the boxes below, entitled "Fecha
desde:" and "hasta." If these boxes are not filled in, the
results will include all dates with those keywords.
If you wish to search the entire index created for
the AGI, regardless of whether or not a particular legajo (bundle)
has been digitized for online viewing, then leave the first
check-box highlighted, entitled "Todos los registros." If you
wish to retrieve only those results for which document images can be
seen online (this is only a fraction of the entire index), then
click the second check-box, entitled "Registros digitalizados."
Once you are finished entering the above
information, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the "Buscar"
button, which will bring you to the search results page (proceed to
step 6).
5. If you want to search for a particular legajo (bundle)
for which you already have a citation (modern numbering system), follow the steps below:
Leave the keyword and date boxes blank, and go
down to the category entitled "Filtro por signatura." Click on the
button entitled "Seleccionar."
Search the list below and choose the particular
section of the AGI that you wish to use; click the "+" symbol to the
left of the name.
After the page reloads with an expanded list of
legajo numbers, presuming the appropriate legajo is not in the first
part of the list below, enter the number of the legajo you wish to
consult in the box entitled "Contiene" and simply hit the enter key
on your keyboard.
After the page reloads again with a highlighted
link for the legajo you chose (presuming that legajo was entered
correctly), either click on that link directly (if there are no
subordinate "Numeros" or "Ramos" or "Libros"), or click on the "+"
symbol below it to open a new list of subordinate divisions.
You can follow this procedure (clicking on the "+" symbols) until
you have the item you want to see, then click on the link for the
item number you want to see.
Once you click on the link to the item you want to
see, the next page that loads will be the original search page with
all the appropriate information now filled in under the "Signatura"
box. Now scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Buscar,"
which will bring you finally to the search results page (proceed to
step 6).
6. If you want to search for
a particular legajo (bundle) for which you only have an old-style
citation number (for example, "54-2-2" instead of "Santo Domingo 124"),
follow the steps below:
Enter the three-digit old-style citation in
the uppermost keyword box (entitled "Buscar"), without any slashes or subsequent numbers
(quotation marks not necessary around the citation), and click "Buscar"
at the bottom of the page.
Follow steps 7-8 below, checking the detailed
index page under the "Area de Notas" to confirm the "Signatura
antigua" before proceeding (there may be several legajos which show
the same old-style number, and the system was quite complex and
occasionally confusing, so there is sometimes more art than science
in finding antiquated citations).
7. Once the search results page opens up, you will see a
list of all the different archive sections that contain results from
your search (this may be multiple sections if you searched by keyword,
but it will only be a single section if you searched by signatura).
Click on the section you wish to see, which will open up another page
with the individual results within that section.
8. Click on whichever of the results you wish to see, and
a new page will open up with detailed index information about the item.
If you see a bar entitled "Ver Imagenes," then you can click on that bar
to open up the document imaging system itself. HINT: Even if you
do not see this bar, if you see a bar entitled "Contiene," it means the
legajo has been digitized, and you may click on this bar and it will
open up a page listing the individual digitized documents which may be
accessed individually through their own detailed information page.
9. The document imaging page includes many helpful aids,
but the basics of navigation and viewing are as follows:
A medium-sized image of each page is shown on the
left side of the screen, and on the right side of the screen are
individual thumbnails of the adjacent pages in blocks of 8 pages.
To review the entire document (some of which can be hundreds of
pages), you can either click on the red "+" or "-" buttons which
will tell you which group of pages you are viewing out of the total
number of images, or you can click on the drop-down box entitled "Selecciona
una imagen" and pick a particular image number to open. You
should note that image numbers rarely correspond directly to folio
numbers, which are normally rendered as "recto" (front) or "verso"
(back), such as 34R or 34V, based either on the original handwritten
numeration of the pages, or on penciled-in numbering that was added
in more modern times for multi-section documents or legajos.
To see a full-sized image of each page, simply
click on the medium-sized image noted above, and a new page will
open with the full-sized image. Within this page, you can leaf
through the adjacent pages (forward and back) using the
"double-arrow" buttons above the image. You can also enhance
the image for reading using the menu on the left of the image.
Images are viewed in JPG format.
10. A few important quirks about the system:
Once you have the search results page listing the
sections of the AGI within which you have results, when you click on
a section name and proceed to the results, you cannot back up in the
browser and click on a different section without backing all the way
up to the search page and clicking "Buscar" again. If you try
to open results within a different section of the AGI, the server
will simply show you the same results from the first section you
clicked (this may not be the case with all browsers, but it's
definitely the case with Firefox). Also, sometimes when using
the "Back" button on your browser, you may get a message regarding
"POSTDATA" having expired from the browser cache; just click "OK"
and you should be able to retrieve previous pages without problem.
If you wait too long (more than 10 or 20 minutes
or so), the PARES system may send you an error message saying "Su
sesion ha caducado" (your session has expired). If this
happens, just click on the bar "Busqueda Avanzada" above, and you'll
be able to renew your session by searching again.
If you have a particular citation for a document
that you wish to see using the "Filtro por signatura" search box,
and if you want to type it in directly (instead of going through the
selection procedure outlined in step 5 above), make sure to use all
capital letters, and make sure NOT to use any spaces between the
section name, legajo, and subordinate designations. Commas are
universally used to separate these designations from each other (no
spaces), and there is also no space between abbreviated section
titles with periods, and the number that follows them (i.e. "Ramo 5"
would appear as "R.5" and not "R. 5"). In
the case of two-word section names (such as Santo Domingo), use an
underline space between the two words (i.e. "SANTO_DOMINGO").
Top of
Page
Archivo General de la
Nación (AGN), Mexico City, Mexico
1. Begin with the main page of the
Nueva Guía General.
2. Click on the yellow link entitled "Fondos, Expedientes,
y Documentos" on the left side; this will open a panel immediately below
this link, in which there is a link at the top and a button entitled "Buscar"
at the bottom (do NOT click the button at the bottom yet).
3. Click on the uppermost link immediately below the "Fondos,
Expedientes, y Documentos" link,
entitled "Archivo General de la Nación;" this will open a new panel
on the right side, with descriptive text about the AGN.
4. Now, finally click on the "Buscar" button at the
bottom of the left side panel; this will open a new window with a search
engine.
5. This search window operates in a very particular
manner; each keyword or set of keywords must first be entered in the
small box on the lower right side of the main box (which you cannot
enter text into directly).
6. After having entered keywords, then click on the
drop-down box initially entitled "Alcance y contenido" in order to
select what type of keyword you are searching for, including "Alcance y
contenido" (contents), "Titulo" (title), and "Fechas" (date). HINTS: use only two or three keywords for each entry at most to get best
results; for names, remove all prepositions such as "de" or "y" from the
name, entering only the main first and last names separated by a space;
and don't forget to try all possible spellings (modern and antiquated)
for any given name or placename or
item, since the index entries are often based on original spellings,
which varied considerably from one document to the next, or from one
time period to the next (i.e. Pensacola, Pansacola, Panzacola,
etc.).
7. Next click on the button on the bottom left entitled "Agregar"
in order to insert the keyword or keywords into the main search box.
8. After having entered one keyword or set of keywords,
you can add additional keywords (including those of different types)
using the same process outlined in steps 5-7 (don't forget to use the
button "Agregar" on the bottom left in order to insert each keyword).
9. Once you are finished entering keywords, press the
button entitled "Aceptar" (second from the bottom right) to submit your
search for processing; this will close the separate search window and
return you to the main page, where there should be a list of results in
the left side panel, and blank space on the right panel. This list
includes the Expediente number of the appropriate document, and usually
the relevant section of the AGN where the expediente is found.
10. Click on any of the list of results on the left side
in order to open a summary description of that document in the right
side panel. This summary will include a brief summary of the
contents of the document, and all relevant location and citation
information.
11. Occasionally, a button will appear on the upper right
side of the right-hand panel within the document description. This
button, entitled "Ver imagen(es)," will open a new window with a
document viewer allowing digital images of the document to be viewed
using simple controls on the screen. These generally appear to be
documents of short length which have been scanned and placed online.
Images are viewed in Adobe Flash format.
Top of
Page
Google Books
Google Books has an ever-increasing collection of
historical books scanned from libraries and archives around the world, and
these are all indexed digitally using OCR software and searchable via a
single search engine. Most of the colonial-era books are available
fully and freely, both for online reading as well as for download in PDF
format (though the downloaded versions are not searchable unless you first
perform your own OCR text recognition routine on them within Adobe Acrobat).
This database is rapidly becoming an essential and invaluable resource for
historical research, in part because it contains such a wide and diverse
variety of poorly-known and little-consulted historical publications that
might never be known to contain obscure historical references without the
digital indexing capacity of Google Books. The primer below focuses on
research into the colonial era relating to Spanish Florida, but can
obviously be adapted to many other research questions from many other
periods.
1. Begin with the
Advanced Book
Search page of
Google Books.
2. Set the following settings:
Search: Select "Full View Only"
Content: Select "All Content"
Language: Select the "Return
pages written in" drop-down menu with "Spanish"
(or whatever other language is desired; Latin volumes seem to show up best
using the Spanish setting, since there is no designated Latin language
setting)
Publication Date: Fill in
the "Return content published between" boxes with a pair of framing
dates, starting with a year as early as you would like to search,
and ending with a year after which you won't need to see results (don't
forget that many books with earlier information were published considerably
later, and that the earliest and rarest editions of books might have been
followed by subsequent reprints or editions that Google Books may be more
likely to have found and scanned).
Results: Select "100
results" in the drop-down box to the left of the "Google Search"
button.
3. Insert search keywords or phrases in the desired
language inside one or more of the four boxes at the top of the search page,
and then press the "Google Search" button, or simply hit "Enter" on your
keyboard. Below are a few helpful observations:
The search engine searches the entire digitized text of
each book, including titles, authors, full text, indices, tables of
contents, etc., meaning there is generally no need to use those more
specific search boxes below (Title, Author, Publisher, Subject), since those
categories seem to be based on information created by Google employees while
digitizing volumes, and are thus subject to possible errors or
standardizations of spelling, etc.
I have found it most useful to use one or more pivotal
terms in the top box ("with all of the words"), omitting
any articles or conjunctions, unless it is important to narrow the search
down to only those sources which contain multiple words in a specific order
(including articles or conjunctions). In this latter case, the
sequence of words should be entered in the second box from the top ("with
the exact phrase"), or simply in the top box with quotation
marks around the entire phrase. Since many of the historical texts
have two columns, however, the Google search engine sometimes mixes up the
order of a particular phrase that may appear on two successive lines in just
one column (inserting the contents of the second column in-between), so it
is generally safer to use the individual keywords in the top box.
The search engine will commonly present results that are
variations on your original search term, such as plurals or different verb
tenses, but entering those same variations as the original search term often
produces slightly different results, meaning it is sometimes useful to use
several different variations of your search term(s) in order to produce
additional results.
Don't forget that colonial-era spelling was often
inconsistent, even within the same document, and in any case commonly
different from modern spellings, and therefore using several different
possible spelling variations on your primary search terms may be useful.
Accents and other diacritical marks are sometimes picked
up by OCR character recognition software, and sometimes missed, and thus
searching both with and without diacriticals can produce more results.
4. Click on any results that seem relevant, which will
bring up the searchable full text of an individual scanned book, usually on
the exact page where the keywords were found. The keywords on the page
that correspond to your original search are normally highlighted in yellow,
but sometimes this is not the case, so you may have to scan the text
yourself to find the words that led the search engine to this particular
page. From this page you can perform many additional tasks, as
follows:
The light yellow bar above the digitized book text will
show how many results were actually found within the entire volume (there
are commonly more than just one). To see all of them, either click
"Previous" or "Next", or simply click "View All" in order to see snippets
showing all of the results. To examine each result individually from
this menu, just click on the snippet, or when this does not work, use the
page reference on the snippet to find the proper page yourself using the
scroll bar to the right of the scanned book.
When multiple keywords were used in the original search,
only those pages that have all of the search terms will appear as results.
In order to find more appearances of each individual keyword, use the search
box to the left of the scanned book in order to re-search just this
individual volume. You can also search the volume with different
keywords using this internal search box.
To jump to the front cover of the volume, click on the
digital image just above the title over the search box on the left hand side
of the screen, and you can scroll down to the original title page and
publication information using the scroll bar on the right. This will
not work when using the "View All" option on the yellow search results bar
above the text, so either click on one of the results to bring up the full
book view, or click on the "x" next to the "Clear Search" option on the far
right of the search results bar to view the full document.
There are also several options on buttons above the book
text to the left, including zoom in and out, double-page view, and
multi-page view.
A warning: if you use the Google Books search box that
appears on the screen above each individual digitized book, none of your
original search parameters or settings will be used, and your results will
include all dates, languages, and formats, including more recent books for
which only previews or snippets are available. In order to go back and
conduct more targeted searches using new terms, just click "Back" on your
browser until you can search either from the original Advanced Book Search
page, or from one of the subsequent search results pages that still shows
the proper date range and settings.
5. In order to see bibliographic citation information
about the digitized book, click on the "About this book" link just below the
internal search box on the left hand side. In addition to providing
summary information about the volume (date, author, full title, etc.), there
should be a number of "Related Books" pictured below which can also be
opened by clicking on their image, and these books are generally related by
content to the book you have just been viewing. Many times, different
volumes of a multi-volume set are shown here, or different editions of the
same volume, can be accessed most easily using the "Related Books" feature.
6. If a PDF copy of the scannned book is desired, simply
click on the drop-down menu with the gear symbol, located to the upper right
of the page, and then click on the "Download PDF" option. This will
open up a new page with an image of a security word that you must type in
before the download begins. Remember, however, that these downloaded
PDF files are very large, and not searchable unless you have OCR capability
in your PDF reader. In addition, the occasional colored scan pages
shown on the online versions of some books will not appear in the downloaded
PDF, which will be in black-and-white format.
