The Lexington Public Library's Local History Index is a very selective index to newspaper articles pertaining to significant people, places, events, churches, businesses and organizations in Lexington and Fayette County. In recent years some articles relating to key issues in the state of Kentucky, such as strip mining, hazardous waste and state government have been included as well.

In recent years the Lexington Herald , the Lexington Leader , and the Lexington Herald-Leader have been issued in several editions. The index does not indicate the edition indexed, but all editions of the newspapers are generally included on the microfilmed copies of the newspapers. If you have trouble locating a citation, be sure to check all editions. Over the years, some errors in indexing have inevitably been made. It was impossible to verify all the card entries when converting them to the web version.
Local History Index Searching Tips

The new Local History Index has some new searching techniques that can give the person searching more control.
The three main features are -,+,*, and " (double quote).

The + operator is added to the beginning of a search word or quoted phrase that is required to be in the specific result.
The - operator is added to the beginning of a search word or quoted phrasethat is required NOT to be in the specific.
The * operator is a wild card that is added to the END of a search word.
The " operator is added to the beginning and end of a group of search words forming an exact phrase to search on.

The following are some examples to help explain these new functionalities.
NOTE: the square brackets are not to be typed literally. They are only visually
representing the search box.

1. To search for articles with the word dogs and the word cats in them type the following:

[+dogs +cats ]

2. To search for dogs but exclude articles with the word cats in them type the following:

[ dogs -cats ]

3. To search for part of a word type the following:

[ encyclop* ]

4. To search for a phrase type the following:

[ "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" ]

For a more detailed description of all the capabilities of Boolean Full Text Searching visit
the MySQL database documentation here

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/fulltext-boolean.html