“Chronicling America” Offers Historic Newspapers Free of Charge

The following announcement was written by the Library of Congress:

The Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities today announced that "Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers" is debuting with more than 226,000 pages of public-domain newspapers from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia and the District of Columbia published between 1900 and 1910. The fully-searchable site is available at www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/.

"Chronicling America" is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress created to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with select digitization of historic pages as well as information about newspapers from 1690 to the present. Supported by NEH’s "We the People" program and Digital Humanities Initiative, this rich digital resource will continue to be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress.

Over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 from all U.S. states and territories. Also on the Web site, an accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information directs users to newspaper titles in all formats. The information in the directory was created through an earlier NEH initiative. The Library of Congress will also digitize and contribute to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper pages drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership. For the initial launch the Library of Congress contributed more than 90,000 pages from 14 different newspaper titles published in the District of Columbia between 1900 and 1910.

"The Library congratulates all the partners in this extraordinary program to make historic newspapers available through our Web site," said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. "The National Digital Newspaper Program provides access to one of our best sources of information about what was considered important to Americans at a given point in time."

"'Chronicling America' will allow students, teachers, historians -- in fact, all Americans -- access to some of our most important historical documents. It is one thing to read about historical events from the perspective of historians, narrated with the value of hindsight. It is entirely different to read the story as it was happening," said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. "'Chronicling America' will be available to the American public for free, forever; and I hope Americans will visit the site and try to imagine the emotions and actions of their forebears as those stories went to print."

The following six institutions received the first NDNP grants to digitize papers in their respective states from the first decade of the 20th century:

• University of California, Riverside, $400,000;
• University of Florida Libraries, Gainesville, $320, 959;
• University of Kentucky Research Foundation, Lexington, $310,000;
• New York Public Library, New York City, $351,500;
• University of Utah, Salt Lake City, $352,693; and
• Library of Virginia, Richmond, $201,226.

New NDNP awardees will be announced later this summer.

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. Its more than 134 million items -- books, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts, maps, photographs, films, sound recordings and digital materials – are accessible through its 21 reading rooms on Capitol Hill. The Library’s newspaper collections have grown to comprise more than 1 million current issues, more than 30,000 bound historical volumes and more than 600,000 microfilm reels.

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports learning in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities. NEH grants enrich classroom learning, create and preserve knowledge, and bring ideas to life through public television, radio, new technologies, museum exhibitions, and programs in libraries and other community places.

Comments

[Leon Toille]

The project and intent is to be admired, but the OCR program used to identify words and names falls short. For example, I searched for the surname WORO which is indeed fairly rare, and got a lot of results...BUT they were all for the words WERE, and a few for WOMEN. That was diaappointing. One wonders what their OCR program was! Who wants to plow through all the "were" words to find Woro?

[Happy Dae]

Perhaps you could search for "ORO "? We ALL work within the limitations of what is available to us. We just have to be smarter than they are, right?

Happy Dae
www.ShoeStringGenealogy.com/ssg1.htm

[Nancy Archdekin]

I also feel that the project and intent is to be admired, but the viewer itself is severely lacking. I did a search on a rare name and found one hit which correctly matched the name. But every time I attempted to zoom or move the page to read the article (which happened to overlap columns), the image was blurred and an hourglass appeared for what seemed to be an eternity. I finally gave up.

[Steve Danko]

I am absolutely thrilled with my experience with the Chronicling America project. I searched the San Francisco Call and found a 1903 announcement for the application for a marriage license. I had been searching for marriage information for this couple, but their marriage records had been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Now, at least I know when and where they applied for a marriage license!

In my hands, the OCR worked flawlessly and the delay to refresh the screen was not unreasonable. My experience was thoroughly enjoyable and productive.

[Ingrid Luke]

This is just wonderful! I had trouble at first with the viewer until I disabled my pop-up blocker. Then the text, after the hourglass was done, was easy to read! Search and results were also very productive for me. Can't wait for more newspapers to be added!

[Deb K]

I was thrilled until I tried searching for two rare family names, and encountered the same trouble that Leon did. A search for "Tanck" yielded "lunch" on one page; a search for "Elble" yielded over 500 hits, which immediately made me suspicious, and sure enough, the first 2 hits I checked were for "sibly" ... despite having DSL, it takes long enough to view a hit at a zoomed size, that I gave up on plowing through 500 hits.
Thanks to Dick for making available the introduction of this site & this project; it has the potential to be an invaluable resource. I will check it again in a few months and see if the OCR recognition has been improved. Unless anyone has any ideas?

[theKiwi]

I guess we're all free if we don't like something to set out to do it better ourselves. :-)

But that said, the thing worked correctly for me on Mac OS X using Safari - it found my search term, showed me the image with the search terms highlighted and let me zoom and pan the image with ZERO problems.

That's more than can be said for the novascotiagenealogy.com viewer which despite their "claim" is useless on Mac OS X, and isn't supported at all on Firefox on Mac OS X apparently.

Roger

[Stuart LeVine]

No luck for me. I also tried rare names. I got completely illegible pages. I downloaded a (7.8meg) JP2 image which is one of the options on the pull down menu with the image - only to find that the OCR result wasn't even close.