About Picture Post
Provides a fascinating snapshot of British life from the 1930s to the 1950s...
This is a facsimile archive (pages are scanned in and look as they did originally) of the Picture Post, a very much picture-based magazine which ran between 1938 and 1957. Its pictures help us see what was happening throughout the years of the second world war and the beginnings of the cold war, the invention of the atomic bomb and later the hydrogen bomb, rockets, jets and so much more; learning just how the world and people in it looked and behaved.
Searching
On the first page you come to there is a search box which allows you to enter keywords relating to what you are interested in. By default it will search through all the words in each article, however you can choose keyword if you wish the database to pick out ones which it sees as more relevant (don't use too many words if you choose the later). It is also possible to choose to search between particular dates or use the advance search form which allows you to choose in which part of the article you wish to search e.g. article title, which section, you can also use a mixture of words and phrases.
A few other tips
- You can use wildcards for searching for words with different endings e.g. Brit* will find Brits, British and Britain.
- You can use Boolean operators/logical operators AND, OR and NOT between words to get rid of things you don't want or increase the number of results e.g. britain and ireland will find articles containing these words anywhere in them not just one next to the other, OR looks for either of the words between them, NOT looks for articles with the first word but not the one afterwards.
- You can use the back button with this database.
Browsing
It is possible to browse by date. You can:
- Look around a date you are interested in, perhaps find out when something happened first, then have a look around that date.
- Have a rumage through lots of back issues just because it can be really interesting!
Managing results
If you have a large number of results it is possible to search within these or to flick through them and tick the articles you are interested in as you go along. Then later you can return to just these by clicking "Marked Items".
Viewing saving and printing articles
You can view articles by clicking on their titles. Once you are on the viewing page you can:
- Move the page around by clicking on the image and draging it using the hand or using the bars at the side and bottom to move up, down and horizontally.
- If you would like to see more you can View Page or Browse Issue (illustrated below)
- Zoom in (or out) including zooming to a particular area; just look for the magnifying glass.
- Send the article to someone (or yourself as a way of keeping the record; use the envelope icon).
Printing and keeping a record of articles can be done using the print icons illustrated in this image. The icon at the top will allow you to print and/or create a PDF file with the article on, and the one further doe just above the article gives you the option of doing this for the full page or the sellection which you can make using the icon next to this print icon.
Access Picture Post and more...
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