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How to Search

To facilitate searches of text in Irish, the extracted text presented here renders lenited consonants ḃ, ċ, ḋ, ḟ, etc. as bh, ch, dh, fh, etc. As such, a search for the term ‘Gaedhilge’ will yield occurrences of both ‘Gaedhilge’ and ‘Gaeḋilge’.

There are two ways to search An Gaodhal in the Digital Library. Users can access the collection view or the IIIF viewer. In the collection view, search queries featuring the letter ‘a’ will yield the letters ‘a’ and ‘á’ e.g. both ‘failte’ and ‘fáilte’. In the IIIF viewer, users must include accented vowel characters to find words containing accented vowels, i.e. only ‘á’ will yield ‘á’. Whatever choice users make, the search is not case-sensitive.

By default, a search seeks whole words, i.e. if you search for ‘Christ’, it will not find ‘Christmas’. To search for parts of a word, use wildcard *: for example, ‘Gaed*’ will yield any word that starts with ‘Gaed’ (‘Gaedhilge’, ‘Gaedhilig’, etc.).

Users can search the entire An Gaodhal collection at the links below. Searches draw on full text and specified metadata fields (title, description) in all Digital Library collections:

Users can refine search results by using the filters on the left.

Users can select individual items i.e. issues of An Gaodhal, to view a single issue of the newspaper via the IIIF viewer. The number of pages in each issue ranges from 8 to 16 pages.

Searching the databases A handful of issues contain additional pages featuring inserted items of annotation. These insertions were created by Rev. Daniel J. Murphy, who collated this series of An Gaodhal, and relate to his work as a song-collector. Where legible, his annotations are included in full text and are tagged as ‘marginalia’.

IIIF search is available for each item - in this case, for each issue of An Gaodhal - via the IIIF viewer. This search is confined to the item text only and does not apply to associated metadata. Highlighted results appear on the page image. English function words (articles, prepositions, etc.) are excluded from this search; here is a full list of such stopwords: a an and are as at be but by for if in into is it no not of on or such that the their then there these they this to was will with.