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Q: What is UNZ.org?

A: The UNZ.org website is intended to provide convenient access to a large quantity of high-quality content material, mostly published over the last 150 years in America and England, including both articles and books, encompassing over one million readable items and titles of another million items not readable due to copyright. Much of this material has never previously been available anywhere on the Internet and should be useful for researchers and intellectual historians.

Q: Why do you include non-readable articles and books?

A: The inclusion of the copyright-excluded material allows users to examine a more nearly complete collection of a given author's writings, even if many of the particular items themselves are currently unavailable due to copyright. If necessary, many of these other items can often be accessed and read on other websites or content systems, especially in the case of extent publications. Furthermore, there is a chance that at some future point these publications will be released for reading on this website as well.

Q: The website seems very different than when I previously visited. What's the story?

A: The current Version 2.0 release of UNZ.org incorporates major design changes from the previous version, but nearly all of the same underlying printed content is still available. Given the relatively slight use of the previous links to external videos and webzines, these portions have been removed, thereby streamlining access to the printed materials which constitute the main value of the system. Another major change has been the widespread use of Javascript, rendering most of the pages "reactive" as you begin entering information.

Q: How do I find a given author or publication?

A: Most of the main pages of the website contain one or more "Reactive Clouds," with the names of various authors or publications. Javascript functions cause these Clouds to "react" and change the displayed information as you begin typing in the entry boxes. For example, as you enter the first few letters of an author's name on the Home page, the Clouds adjust to display only those authors whose names begin with those letters. Similar adjustments occur as you start typing in a particular decade or year, or if you select one of the drop-down settings or other filter. This allows you to quickly focus in on the individuals you are seeking based on your particular criteria.

At any point, the relative size of the names in a given Cloud indicates the volume of underlying content material associated with that name. Meanwhile, the color indicates what fraction of the content material is readable (for copyright reasons): bright blue indicates mostly readable, dark blue indicates partly readable, and black means mostly unreadable

Q: How do I find a given article or book?

A: The main Articles and Books pages, as well as the Overview tabs for individual authors or publications, display a Listing of articles (or books) towards the bottom of the page. Like the Clouds, these Listings are "reactive" and automatically adjust as you being typing in any of the information in the various data entry fields---Title, Author, Publication, or Period, displaying only those items that match your selection.

Q: What about the individual publications?

A: When you reach the pages associated with a given publication, you can examine the contents in a number of different ways, accessed via the different tabs. The default Overview tab gives you the Cloud of authors for that publication plus the Listing of individual articles, with both of these being "reactive" as you provide information in the Title, Author, or Period fields.

There are also several other tabs. The Tree tab displays a dynamic tree allowing the individual time periods, issues, and articles to be opened for greate detail. The Year Contents tab displays the tables of contents for all the issues of a given year, the Issues, Small Covers, and Large Covers tabs display those views of the contents for a given decade, and the All Years tab provides an overview of the entire archive of the periodical. In addition, the drop down field in the control bar may be used to explore the different periods. All these pages allow for convenient browsing of the contents of a given periodical and clicking on any of the individual links accessing more detailed information.

Q: How does Searching work?

A: As mentioned above, much of the exploration of the website contents is normally performed by browsing the various different pages or entering information into the various text fields and having the displayed information automatically adjust. Actual Searches are performed in a parallel manner, by entering the target information into the data fields and then pressing the Search button (or simply hitting Enter). The system then performs a Search across the selected Text, Title, Author, and other information and displays the findings in a new Search Results tab.

Searches may be performed on any of these individual pages, or on the Power Search page, which allows for more detailed Searches across all content material.