Archive for the ‘ChroniclingAmerica’ Category
California Weekly Newspapers to be Preserved Online
The University of California Riverside’s California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) is expanding to include weekly papers in searchable archive. The full news story from June 21, 2011 is “California Weekly Newspapers to be Preserved Online” and it’s online here. This is great news about the California Digital Newspaper Collection’s growth and success!
Also, there is a minor point in the news story that I wanted to clarify. The news story notes:
Libraries in Minnesota and Florida also are collecting PDFs of newspaper pages, but do not offer the ability to search text across titles, Geiger said. Software developed to process historical newspapers in the California Digital Newspaper Collection makes it possible to archive PDF pages in a way that permits text searches.
The Florida Digital Newspaper Library does allow users to search text across titles. The searching does not use the PDF versions of the files for this, but the derivatives, so the process is different. This is important for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library’s users, but the point the article is trying to make is also very important. The article is trying to explain that CDNC has implemented new technology that allows this to happen from the PDFs which may be the optimal method for many other digital newspaper libraries/collections/archives. Thus, CDNC is sharing great news both in terms of more content being preserved and accessible in an ever-improving interface and for the software that could be useful for others. I don’t know that the importance of both aspects come through in the article (which may be my own mis-reading or it may be that it isn’t completely clear in the article, which is a normal occurrence when technical news is fused with easier/fun news on new content).
Search the California Digital Newspaper Collection >>
“Google abandons master-plan to archive the world’s newspapers”
According to a blog story from the Boston Phoenix, “Google abandons master-plan to archive the world’s newspapers“:
Google told partners in its News Archive project that it would cease accepting, scanning, and indexing microfilm and other archival material from newspapers, and was instead focusing its energies on “newer projects that help the industry, such as Google One Pass, a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites.”
The deal Google struck with partner newspapers stipulated that, somewhere down the line, a paper could purchase Google’s digital scans of its content for a fee. That fee is now being waived, and Google is not only giving publishers free access to the scanned files, but also the rights to publish them with other partners. In essence, Google just scanned a huge chunk of the newspaper industry’s valuable long-tail content, and then handed it to the publishers.
This frees newspapers to partner with new institutions to develop new features for their historic archives and to ensure the long-term preservation of materials. For instance, the Library of Congress and NEH’s project, Chronicling America, started before the Google News Archive and is an ongoing program to digitize historical newspapers and ensure long-term free access and preservation for all of its contents. The work already done by Google is a great public benefit, made all the more so by allowing newspapers to partner and repurpose their content without restriction for even more impact.
Chronicling America Adds Topics
Chronicling America, the amazing historical newspaper digital collection from the Library of Congress and NEH, has added “Topics“. With over a million pages of historical newspapers online, “Topics” are an essential need–helping users who aren’t sure what they’re looking for find a way into so much content and helping to showcase some of the highlights of so much great content for all users.
Some of the topics that include Florida content (as the Interim Director for the University of Florida Digital Library Center, which supports the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the ones with Florida content are those of greatest interest to me):