Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query newspapers. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query newspapers. Sort by date Show all posts

Monday, July 28, 2014

Online Digital Newspaper Collections by State -- The Lists by State

Thanks for your patience with this post. I had a trip to Canada and Alaska in the middle of writing this series and then a move to Provo, Utah and got behind. Now to the list of online digital newspaper collections by states. Here is the list (finally) bear in mind that this list is not intended to be comprehensive. This list is now as complete as it can be.

Anyway, I doubt that a comprehensive list could be accurate because of the constant changes. The longer I looked for content the more I found. Some of the websites still had microfilm content, but if there was no other digital online content, I listed the microfilm repositories.

Remember that there may be collections of newspapers from any particular state in the general links I had in my previous post introducing the links to the state collections. See Online Digital Newspaper Collections by State -- The Lists Introduced. I suggest that most of the states are in the midst of finishing paper collections, expanding microfilm collections or digitizing existing collections. I have included some statewide efforts even though there is no evidence that the newspapers in question are available online as yet. There may be more than one link to the digital collections since I found that there were other valuable resources listed in different places.

By the way, here are a few more national or regional sources for newspapers online:
Alabama
Alaska
American Samoa
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Guam
Hawaii 
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Northern Marianas Islands
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Puerto Rico
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Virgin Islands
Washington
Washington, D.C.
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
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Saturday, September 29, 2012

Where have all the newspapers gone?

Once when I was a teenager, I had a friend whose father was a pressman for the newspaper. We went downtown one day to visit his father at the newspaper. I remember going into the huge press room where the noise was so loud that you could not hear when shouting. I think that the newspaper press was one of the largest, noisiest, and most complicated machines I had seen up to that time in my life. I always remember the old movies and TV shows, when something was happening, they would always show the presses running and a copy of the newspaper, showing the headlines would come spinning out until it showed on the screen, to emphasize the importance of the event. Presses still run and they are still loud, but the only spinning newspapers I have seen lately are in old movies.

Phoenix used to have two daily newspapers, the Arizona Republic, and the Phoenix Gazette. Now there is hardly one. If you want to get some idea of the impact of the digital age on print newspapers, look at the Wikipedia article, List of defunct newspapers of the United States and the website, Newspaper Death Watch. The only newspaper I see now is a free advertising paper thrown on my driveway three or four times a week.

Realizing that print newspapers are disappearing rapidly, a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities created the National Digital Newspaper Program. The U.S. Federal Government is not alone in its interest in preserving its newspaper heritage, individual states have similar projects and many other countries of the world have adopted aggressive programs to digitize existing newspaper collections. In addition, there are significantly large private commercial collection efforts. There is a list of national projects online at Wikipedia.

In my experience, genealogists tend to think of newspapers in a very limited way, mainly as a place to look for obituaries. Very few researchers have made extensive use of the newspapers' content in their research. But the newspapers' content stretches way beyond obituaries. Newspapers were the daily diary of the world. Especially in small towns, newspapers were the Facebook of their day and told the story of the families living in the circulation area. Today, most who see some of the old newspapers for the first time, are amazed at the rich detail in their pages.

Some public libraries, many historical societies and some museums have collections of old newspapers moldering away in basements and storage areas undigitized. It is still too early to tell if the digitization efforts will stem the loss of these valuable records. It is a fact of life that newspaper were printed on cheap, high acid content paper and if left unconserved, the papers will disintegrate over time.

The first go-to place for newspapers in the United States, is the Library of Congress. The Chronicling America, National Newspaper Project, has millions of pages of completely indexed newspapers online as well as a Directory of all the papers published in America from 1690 to the present. In every country where there is a similar project you can find collections of newspapers. For example, the National Library of Australia (NLA) provides free searchable online access to digitized copies of out-of-copyright Australian newspapers (1802–1982). The NLA list of available titles includes more than 50 capital city and rural newspapers. There are many, many more examples.

In the U.S. there are also online, usually commercial subscription services such as MyHeritage.com's WorldVitalRecords, Newsbank.com (GenealogyBank.com) and many others.

Hopefully, when the presses stop rolling for the last time, we will still have our legacy of newspapers to research.
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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Online Digital Newspaper Collections by State -- The Introduction

Newspapers are one of the most crucial type of genealogically important records, but they are also one of the types of records most likely to be lost. By their nature, newspapers were printed on cheap, highly acidic paper that begins to deteriorate almost immediately. In Arizona, we received a lot of local newspapers delivered free to our driveway. If we did not retrieve them quickly, in a matter of hours in the Arizona sun, they already had begun to turn yellow because of the chemicals used to produce the paper. Even if carefully preserved, newsprint becomes brittle and yellow with age.

Because many newspaper repositories around the world recognize the temporary nature of newsprint, there have been massive efforts to preserve the existing paper copies for some time now. Many countries around the world have already begun the process of preserving their "newspaper heritage" through digitization projects. Making a legible copy of a newspaper page obviously requires specialized (read expensive) equipment and handling the brittle pages is also a concern. In the United States, the digitization efforts have taken an interesting turn. Many older newspapers were initially preserved through microfilm copies, so additional specialized equipment is needed to make digitized copies of the already photographed roles of microfilm. Initially, commercial enterprises began the process of microfiliming copies of newspapers and providing the microfilmed records to libraries and other repositories. Some of these same companies have now digitized these records and provided them online. For this reason, some of the larger digital collections are private, commercially operated companies.

There is another very important issue in the digitization effort. That is the existence of copyright claims. Here is one area where copyright acts as a extreme hinderance to preservation. The tremendous length of copyright protection exceeds the life expectancy of the media. In other words, the newspapers will disappear before the copyright to their content expires. This presents a legal nightmare for the prospective digitization projects. In addition, many newspapers were published for only a short period of time and further, the companies or individuals publishing the newspaper are long since dead or defunct. These and other factors make overcoming the obstacles imperative and dramatically point out the inadequacies of some of our social and legal structures.

There are quite a few national efforts in the United States to make digital copies of the newspapers available online. Most of these are subscription only services and in some cases, it is difficult to determine the exact coverage of their collections. Since some newspapers were published for only a short time or the publishing companies were sold or went out of business, determining which copies are available and where they are located is a problem. Small local libraries or historical societies may have the only existing copies of some newspapers. In some cases, these local collections have been consolidated in state libraries and historical societies. There are also likely some valuable collections in private collections. Presently, new digitization projects are announced regularly.

Newspapers are an extremely valuable source of information for genealogists. Much of the history of our ancestors in America can only be found by reading the newspapers of their time. By their nature, most historians and genealogists included, have viewed newspapers as "secondary" sources. Even today, newspaper reporting is maligned as inaccurate and sensational. Those criticisms are well deserved. But in many cases vital information about our ancestors may only have preserved in the local or national newspapers. No reasonably exhaustive search is complete without searching newspaper archives.

I am aware of only one attempt that has been made to list all of the newspapers in the United States ever published in one database. This is the US Newspaper Directory - 1690 - Present on the Library of Congress website. It is interesting that I find this resource seldom mentioned or used by genealogists. The Library of Congress has listed virtually every newspaper known to exist in a public collection. The list is limited by the lack of adequate such lists available from commercial online websites however. In some cases the copies of newspapers listed in state and local repositories may also be available on one of the large national commercial websites.

The limitation of the Library of Congress list is that it is overwhelming in most cases. Any search by state will produce hundreds of newspapers published over the time periods included in the directory. When I show this list to genealogical researchers for a specific county they are usually surprised and overwhelmed at the number of newspapers published and the effort it would take to try to locate and read them all. But this one fact alone indicates how much history of our ancestors is being ignored by the failure to comprehensively search existing sources.

Another attempt at listing just the the online collections is available from Wikipedia. The article is entitled Wikipedia:List of online newspaper archives. When I considered doing a list of such resources, similar to the list I did recently for Online Digital Map Collections by State, I thought seriously about whether such a list was necessary given the two lists I have so far referenced. Wouldn't any such list of digital newspapers just be a copy of what is already in the other two lists? However, both lists lack an explanation and overview. When I started the list of maps, my wife asked me why I didn't put out the list serially, state by state. At the time, I decided to go ahead and make an entire list even if it could be criticized as incomplete because I was unaware of any such list.

Interestingly, both the Library of Congress list and the one on Wikipedia ignore the commercially available online archives. Some of the links in the Wikipedia article are to commercial websites, but neither list includes a list of those online repositories. What I finally decided to do was to create my own list, which I could then incorporate into the FamilySearch Research Wiki and include as many online sources as I could find. But to do this properly, I need the time to compile the list one or two states at a time. Once the project is complete, then I can publish the entire list in one post for an easy reference.

So I begin. I am aware of only one attempt at compiling a significant number of digital newspaper images for free access. That is the Library of Congress's Chronicling America, Historic American Newspapers. At the time this post is being written, the Library of Congress had 7,705,905 digitized pages online. It appears to me that the collection grows at about the rate of 500,000 pages or so every six months. This list can be searched by every word in the newspapers. When I tell genealogists about this online source, they immediately ask whether or not that includes obituaries. I usually say, no, they cut them out before doing the digitization. Of course, the obituaries are included. Once again, however, it is important to understand the role that copyright plays in all of this effort to digitize content.

Once the newspapers are imaged (digitized) this is only the first step in the process. Next, the content of the newspaper must be indexed. This is usually accomplished by using optical character recognition software (OCR). By its nature, OCR software is not perfect because the original copies may not be readable or the text may be missing. Mistakes in the original are also duplicated by accurate OCR. So any index to newspapers will be limited by the ability of the programs to read the text. As with any original document that has been indexed either by people or programs, it is important to view the original documents. This is one huge limitation of the commercially available newspaper collections. They usually have no convenient way to see the entire edition of the newspaper or read the papers as a whole from day to day. Their search engines often produce a single page from the newspaper with no apparent way of moving either to the previous page or to successive pages of the same edition. This makes the researcher entirely dependent on the indexes.

OK, this is enough of an introduction. I will now have to look forward to getting down to work and producing the list. Stay tuned. Oh, by the way, this was started in the middle of my vacation so don't expect too much for a while. My next post will be on the effect of copyright on digital newspapers online. I think this is an important consideration and needs to be discussed before jumping into the whole subject of making a list of digital online content.

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