Digital Library Center Blog | UF

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 >>

The Wakulla News from October 22, 2009 has a news story on their archives in the Florida Digital Newspaper Library.

While I’ve read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, I’d only ever seen it in book format, until now. It’s always nice to find exciting new materials from the UF Digital Collections, but it’s equally wonderful to find amazingly interesting versions of familiar materials, especially with cover page political cartoons like this.

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):

• Baseball’s Modern World Series, 1903-1910
• From Territory to Statehood – The West
• Patent Medicines
• Pullman Porters