Slashdot Mirror


Bringing the Library of Congress Newspapers Online

smooth wombat writes "If you want to read a newspaper article from sometime in the past (say 1920 for example) your only options right now are to go to your local library and hope they have a microfiche file of that paper or take a visit to Washington, DC and the Library of Congress. That may soon change. CNN is reporting that by 2006 the government will have the first of 30 million digitized pages from papers published from 1836 through 1922 which will be available to anyone who has a connection to the net. The project is a joint cooperation between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. The span of the joint project is limited because type faces of printers used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read, and copyright restrictions are in force on papers published after 1923."

11 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. This sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    If the Library of Congress is entirely digitized, that's going to totally screw up the "burning Libraries of Congress" measurement of energy output.

    1. Re:This sucks by quamaretto · · Score: 5, Funny

      How about "burning Libraries of Congress to CD"?

      --
      *is run over by rotten tomatoes*
    2. Re:This sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Burning LoC servers under a slashdotting.

  2. Thank you (C)opyrights law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    In 7 years we'll be able to read about black Monday.

    1. Re:Thank you (C)opyrights law by rainman_bc · · Score: 2, Funny

      In 7 years we'll be able to read about black Monday.
      Not if someone patents the act of reading historical articles about black Monday!

      --
      09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
  3. You know it's coming by daeley · · Score: 4, Funny

    (From the digitized 1844 paper...)

    Howdy, pardner! To read about that scalliwag Black Bart's shootout with Arizona Jack last week, you'll need to pay two bits per article or buy a subscription for a gold dollar or its equivalent in salt pork or live chickens.

    --
    I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
  4. Re:Typeface ? by PhilipOfOregon · · Score: 5, Funny
    Yef, we could recalibrate the OCR for the early fontf, but the text ftartf to look ftrange.

    "Purfuit of Happineff"

  5. Re:Typeface ? by chaffed · · Score: 2, Funny

    American English has come a long way since 1836. The When attempting to scan older material, the OCR was probably rendering text that read akin to l33t.

    --
    What could possibly go wrong?
  6. Re:Copyright limits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    180 years seems like a reasonable number to us.

    the william randolph hearst family

  7. Re:Check out Dec. 7, 1941 some time by CJ+Hooknose · · Score: 3, Funny

    Please tell me why: I checked Dec 7 1941 but there was no article on Perl Harbor Now I can't shake this mental image of Japanese Zeroes dropping extremely large regular expressions on the USS Arizona....

    --
    Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
  8. Finally by jonnystiph · · Score: 3, Funny

    An complete resource for all those Call of Cthulhu campains.

    --

    If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank