Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Saturday, December 29, 2012

The California Digital Newspaper Collection


I am always extremely interested whenever there is a new online database of digitized sources.  I was interested to see a reference to The California Digital Newspaper Collection. Here's a description of the database:
The California Digital Newspaper Collection contains over 400,000 pages of significant historical California newspapers published from 1846-1922, including the first California newspaper, the Californian, and the first daily California newspaper, the Daily Alta California. It also contains issues of several current California newspapers that are part of a pilot project to preserve and provide access to contemporary papers.
The project is sponsored by the University of California Riverside. It is part of the  Center for  Bibliographic  Studies and  Research which includes the English Short-Title Catalog (1473-1800), the California Newspaper Project, the Californian  Digital  Newspaper  Collection, the Catálogo Colectivo de Impresos Latinoamericanos hasta 1851, and the California Newspaper Microfilm Archive.
The English Short-Title Catalog is a vast database designed to include a bibliographic record, with holdings, of every surviving copy of letterpress produced in Great Britain or any of its dependencies, in any language, worldwide, from 1473-1800. In order to increase access to these items, we include references to microfilm, digital, and other facsimile versions. All of the records are fully searchable online.
 The websites include a guide to Britain's territories, colonies, and possessions from the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, the period covered by the English Short Title Catalogue.

Okay, so now I'm getting overwhelmed. Here we have a huge database but obviously contains information valuable to genealogical research that is completely gone underneath my radar. I guess watching the Internet  day and night doesn't seem to help much.

2 comments:

  1. Greetings! I am actually curious about one thing, of course if that's not too much to ask could you please tell us the place where you spent your childhood?

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  2. The California Digitized Newspaper Archive is a very valuable research tool but like any site relying on scanned originals and character recognition searches, we should remember to modify our searches accordingly. In my use of the site I searched primarily for Coghlan but found some important items under searches for Coghlau. Cogblan, Ooghlan, Ooghlau Etc. The site also offers users an opportunity to correct text as you research. This is a great boon to future users.

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