About the Archives

The Advocate archive is a work in progress. We currently have over 3000 editions available (roughly half of all published editions) spanning over 65 years. Please refer to the following grid to find which years are currently available, and which are coming soon. Also, please be sure to read our "Getting Started" guide below for instructions and other important information before beginning.

Getting Started is Simple

In order to access pages from The Advocate archives, you will need to do the following:

Important Notes about the Archive (**Please read before starting**)

Required Software

The pages in the archive are in Adobe PDF format. In order to view these files, you will need to have Adobe Reader installed on your computer. Newer versions of Adobe Reader include a feature that will highlight the search terms that you enter when viewing the PDF file.

We recommend running the latest version of Adobe Reader.

Availability

This archive is a work in progress and not all past editions are currently available. Please refer to this grid to see which years are currently available. We will be continuing to add editions over time and hope to have a complete archive of all editions available by mid 2010.

Search Accuracy

In order for us to implement a search engine for the archive, we had to scan each page and run it through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software that converts the printed word into digital data. The OCR process relies heavily on the quality of the printed material, therefore older newspaper editions that tend to have be poorer condition typically produce less accurate OCR results. Keep this in mind when entering your searches. If you fail to find someone by their first and last name, try only their last name and browse through the matching text results to find specifically what you are looking for.

Photos

A large portion of the archive was digitized from existing microfilm. The microfilm editions were shot in black and white only which does not typically convey photographs very well, especially if the edition was originally printed in gray-scale. Advocate editions printed between 1893 to 1950 were printed in black and white only. That being the case, photographs from those editions typically did not lose quality in the conversion process. Editions printed after 1950 were typically printed in gray-scale, hence a significant loss of quality. Our goal is to scan editions from 1970 to present in gray-scale to preserve the quality of photographs.