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."

Comments

Oxford University tried something similar

[Derling Whirvish]

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.

Re:Typeface ?

[DunbarTheInept]

The fonts were not as uniformly rendered then as they are today.

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:

XX XX
X X XX X
XXXXXX XXX XX
X X X X
X X X XX

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.

you don't have to go to local library or LOC

[Squeezer]

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/