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."
I'm surprised they haven't done this sooner... But supposedly, MIT is working on a thing to scan in every document ever in the LOC, for internet access. A monumental task.
This is not entirely accurate. The Washington Post's archive is available from 1877 to present day if you're willing got pay.
From 1877-1986, the Post offers the full page scans of the articles as they appeared in the newspaper. Begining in 1987, the full text versions of articles (without photos) are available.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Oxford University did a trial project to see how difficult it would be to place some 18th and 19th Century journals online. Here is the final report giving some of the difficulties they had. The journals are available here and make for some very interesting browsing.
This has already been done for journals by the Making of America Project. So wouldn't the
process be similar for for newspapers. But, newspapers are printed on lower quality paper and
possibly lower quality printing technology.
Making of America (MOA)
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/ (Cornell U)
http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/ (U Michigan)
Owning historical documents must be at least potentially lucretive. The public record has some information, but there's a lot of explanation and commentary that only news articles have. Of course, people tend not to cite sources more extensively than in covered by fair use, and they can go to the LoC to look things up, so they don't really have to buy back-issues (assuming that they even could for most 1923 newspapers at this point), but it's still a possibility.
The New York times has free registration (and non-registration versions of the URLs) for current articles, but their archives require paying money.
Yes, but you charge for it. This will be free. If I were you, I'd start looking for a new business model... or start donating to Disney's lobbying fund.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
1. Even with the same exact font (blocks of type) being used, one letter 'A' and the next letter 'A' could look different enough to confuse an OCR program, due to blotchy ink or blotchy paper, like so:2. Also, the spacing between letters was not as uniform, which would con fuse an OCR pro gram into B reaking words at in con vein ientplaces.
3. And, as the other pofter mentioned, theref the ditterent ftyle ot fymbolf they ufed to ufe.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
In 7 years we'll be able to read about black Monday.
Nope; everything from 1909 to 1922 is only in the public domain because it was grandfathered in in the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Newspapers that were published in 1929 will be in the public domain in until 1929+95 years. So in 2025 you'll be able to read about Black Monday.
they put effort into changing the format from paper to Jpeg or whatever.
Feist says that just effort doesn't a copyright make; it requires creative input.
Project guttenberg has their small print because of editing
Reread the small print. It's not a copyright license, it's a trademark license. If you remove the Project Gutenberg trademark from the etext, you can do whatever you want with it. (Assuming it's not one of the rare ones that's still under copyright, but the author gave the right post it.)
Each state has an archives + history department (or somethign similar to archive all state history). You can go to your state's archies and history dept and pull just about any state newspaper from any time period that you want. We go from the present (well a couple of weeks before present, it takes us a few days to convert the newspaper to microfilm). our oldest newspaper on microfilm is from 1736.
Yes its not online. we don't have the staff or money to put it online, pesently, but we are trying to put as much of our records online right now.
Anyway, you can check out the one I work for, and if you Live in Mississippi, please come by and check us out. We are open 6 days a week and are totally free.
http://www.mdah.state.ms.us/
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
>>"...I'm not so sure about the significance of the content, what did they write/read in 19th Century?
"
Presumably, everything you missed by not taking history.
In that timespan, the U.S. expanded to the Pacific; fought wars with Mexico and Spain; participated in World War One; prompted the formation of the League of Nations; built the world's largest railway network; invented the telegraph, telephone, electric light, and the airplane; developed mass production and the auto industry; produced inumerable works of literature (start with Sam Clemens); fought the Civil War and abolished slavery; spawned the movie, recording, radio and popular music industries.
For a start.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
In the online world, it is completely impossible to show somebody something without similtaneously giving them a copy of that same something.
No, it's not. These guys (http://www.authentica.com/) have done quite a good job of document control and management. I can show you whatever I want and you can't see it once you're done and I revoke access. (requires a plug in for acrobat to use).
We use this system to control restricted access and above documents at my office. Not even a screen capture works!
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Plagarism is taking credit for others' work. Copyright actually encourages plagarism, as the odds of being caught are much lower if you plagarise.
Plagarism can occur with or without there being copyright, and with or without permission from the author. If copyright determined plagarism, students who copied papers would be all fine and kosher because they had permission to copy the paper from the copyright holder.
Also, plagarism is legal with regards to the copyright code and people who hire ghostwriters don't go to jail over the practice. Plagarism is only a moral and an academic thing. Copyright has the force of law behind it (in this day in and age, an obscene amount) and is focused with economics and transfers of wealth and control, not on morals.