19th Century News Coming Online

mfh writes "The BBC is reporting that approximately a million news stories from the 19th century are going online. The project will cost roughly $3.6 mil USD (converted from UK pounds) and include 100 years of news and images from publications that are no longer copyright protected, and currently only available at the Newspaper Library in Colindale, North London. 52000 newspapers and magazines will be included and the project should take 18 months to complete. This is good news for Slashdotters, as this online archival project will provide a plethora of background material for articles and comments, and possibly pave the way for better online library projects with more current material."

Comments

Homicide In Chicago 1870-1930

[AgentGray]

This reminds me of a website that Nothwestern has opened that has most of the case files from Chicago homicides from 1870 to 1930.

Take a look.

It's incredible. How did anyone ever survive the city during that time period? If you feel like doing a little sleuthing and completing some unsolved cases, check it out. There's solved cases there as well.

It's a good complement to Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen.

The other amazing this is that almost nothing has changed in over 100 years...

Google Catalogs?

[TinheadNed]

Sorry to burst your bubble but they do. I have no idea how they do it, and tbh the sheer processing power or raw manpaper of scanning scares me.

Re:Its a good start

[nautical9]

This is a good time to remind folks of the Distributed Proofreaders project, now the largest contributor to Project Gutenberg, where anyone can take a scanned page and compare it to the OCR output to check for errors. Sign up and give it a go - all browser based, and actually quite addictive. :)

Get involved and help keep out-of-print and out-of-copyright books around forever.

Re:Benefits Over...?

[illtud]

There is a style of cartoon drawing (Illingworth) that would probably have you suspended from high school if you were to draw anything similar

Leslie Illingworth's original cartoon collection is in the National Library of Wales. The entire collection has been digitized and will be launched shortly on the Library's digital mirror.

Wait just a dang minute.

[jdjonsson]

I've been working on a project similar to this for several years now. http://www.digitalnewspapers.org We have nearly 200,000 pages online and searchable.

Had this for a little while now

[mnewton32]

Paper of Record is a site run by a Canadian company showing off their digitisation software. It's a pay site, but I had a trial membership, and it's pretty cool. Lots of Canadian papers, but American and other foreign ones are plentiful too. All in PDF format, with fairly accurate searching.

Re:And Who Pays For This?

[geeklawyer]

The BBC is reporting the news but it is not BBC content that is being published. The publisher is the British Library: a statutory body funded by government, or to be more exact by the taxpayer. I think you may be confusing the recent story about the BBC making available some of it's own material under a Creative Commons Licence. That was an entirely seperate news item .

Of course the point you make is still valid if you extend the issue to the general public funding of such resources; from licence fees to taxes. While taxation funding is preferable to licence fee funding because it is broader and creates no damage to other BBC broadcasting functions, either is preferable to none. A well functioning public domain benefits everyone by allowing creative use of resources that would otherwise be difficult to find or unobtainable.

I've done research at the Colindale library site. Let me be blunt to the point of vulgarity: it is a cunt of a place; Colindale is at the arse end of London; hard to get to; unpleasant to study in; hot sweaty and a fucking nusiance. I resolved not to go there again unless I had a choice. Broader and more convenient national, and better still global public access, would be a benefit to everyone. Research would be easier and more convenient: new better works would be created; students and researchers would produce better work's more easily etc. etc.; the public commons would be extended, rather than contracted under the prevailing "everyone must pay for everything" economists perfect pricing scheme promulgated by copyright rights-owners.

Is all this extra worth expense to the public? Damn straight it is. A bargain.