Many thanks to a patron who requested this how-to, as the ability to clip, save, and print quality images from Chronicling America can be a challenge! We have a few tried-and-true techniques  (and free!) to help you out.

Chronicling America offers a few different ways to easily clip, save, and print images, with varying quality of the images.

We’ve also  included a few alternative methods that have worked for the project. (Note: we are not promoting any of these resources; while we’ve had successes with these alternative methods and online tools, we understand they may not work well for everyone!)

1. Saving/Sorting Images:

• Share/Save Button: Chronicling America has a share/save button on the top of each page that allows you to copy and paste the newspaper page’s link, save to your favorites folder, email, share with social media, or download the image to an RSS feed, as a jp2, or pdf.

• Bottom Label: Every Chronicling America page has a bottom        label with the newspaper title, date, and a hyperlink. This allows you to copy and paste the information into a document. It’s a great tool for keeping relevant pages organized.

Alternative Routes for Saving/Sorting Images:

• Zotero:  Zotero is a free open-source bibliographic tool that allows you to easily store, organize, save, and export research materials right from your browser. You can download it via the website: https://www.zotero.org/

You can have it as a stand-alone desktop application or use it through Firefox (a free downloadable browser)–see our screen shot below:

Basic instructions (for using it in Firefox):

1. Once you have a page on Chronicling America you want to save, go up to the Zotero button. If you click on the upside-down triangle, you can select how you want to save the material. 2. There are few different options  for how to save the page when you do this. We like to use “Save to Zotero as Web Page,” as it will send you right to the page when you click on the page again. Explore which method works best for you and your research!

What’s great about Zotero is you easily organize bookmarked links and also export bibliographic content to a Word document, with proper citation!!

• Pinterest: Try using Pinterest, a free online tool for bookmarking images. Pinterest has an easy pinning button that allows you to pin images quickly, just by hovering your pointer over the image. Hint: You must be on the search screen or clipping page to save an newspaper page this way. It can be a fine way to collect images for specific research projects and keep track of them. See                       our Pinterest page for examples!

 2. Clipping Images:

 

• Clip Image Tool: Fastest, but hardest to manage/lowest quality

1. Use the small red box as a guide to zoom in on the article you wish to clip. (The red box shows what portion of the page will be clipped.)
2.  When ready, press the scissor icon.
3. This will bring up a separate tab with the image you focused on. It might take several tries to get the article as you would like it to look.
4. On this separate tab (shown below) you can either print or download the image as a jpeg. Note: the quality is not the best for close-zooming in or reading. It is a great option, though, for quickly collecting images.

 

• PDF: Fast, high-quality images, but tricky to save to other          formats.

1. Press the PDF button on the toolbar about the newspaper page to download the page as a PDF. The text will be of the highest quality & easy to read.
2. [Adobe Reader instructions] To clip an article out of a PDF page, go to “Edit” then “Take a Snapshot.”

   

3. Draw a square over the article you wish to take a picture of.
4. Open up  Microsoft Paint (or a similar alternative, like Google Drawing, or Word if you’re pasting it into a paper). Go up to “Paste” or press Ctrl-V.
5. Crop as needed and save in highest resolution (or resolution desired).

• JP2: Highest quality & precise image, but large image file & more time-consuming. (VTDNP’s go-to for article clipping!)
  
  1. You’ll first need to have downloaded a jpeg 2000 (JP2) viewer. There are a number of viewers out there, some free, some at a cost. We use here at VTDNP IrfanView, which works well for our purposes. It’s free for download here: https://www.irfanview.com/.
  2. Once you have a JP2 viewer, you can download high quality newspaper images.
  3. Once you’ve found a newspaper page with an article you want to clip, press the JP2 button at the top of the newspaper image.
  4. Open up the downloaded image.
  5. Click and drag a box over the content you wish to clip.
  6. Go up to “Edit” and then “Crop Selection (Cut out).”

     

  7.  Go to “File,” “Save As,” and save it in the format you would like. You can save it as a high-quality jpeg or any other number of formats.

Alternative Route for Clipping Images:

• Print Screen: This generally will allow you to get a high-quality image!
  1. Simply have on your screen the image of the article you want focused in to the size you want it to be.
  2. Press “Print Screen” (on PCs this is a button usually on the left-hand side of your keyboard; MAC users press “Command-Shift-3”).
  3. Open up  Microsoft Paint (or a similar alternative, like Google Drawing, or Word if you’re pasting it into a paper). Go up to “Paste” or press Ctrl-V.
  4. Crop as needed and save in highest resolution (or resolution desired).

 3. Printing Images:

• To print directly from Chronicling America, just below the search bar is a “Print” button. Hint: Before clicking this, make sure you have zoomed in to the image you want to print (use the red box on the inset as a guide). Press this & you will go to another tab showing the image. Press “Print” here and it will print the image you have zoomed in on.
• To print a high-quality image, follow the steps for the PDF, JP2, and Print Screen options in the Clipping Images section.

 

We hoped this how-to helped!

 

More Questions? Comments? Other tried-and-true methods to save, print, and clip      articles?

Email Karyn at knorwood@uvm.edu