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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."
Yet another good reason for copyrights to expire after a reasonable number of years.
I'm not so sure about the significance of the content, what did they write/read in 19th Century?
Obituaries and marriage announcements, for one this. This stuff will be a gold mine for genealogists.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
The span of the joint project is limited because type faces of printers used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read
That excerpt strongly implies the use of OCR, in which case the search engines probably won't require a substantial amount of time to index the archive.
On a related note, many historically memorable events occurred during the timeframe mentioned. These include the American Civil War, the Titanic disaster, and many others.
Do you like German cars?
The fact that you have no idea what people wrote or read about shows the importance of making the materials more accessible.
These, to me, were always half the fun whenever I perused old microfiche in the library.
There is a bar in NYC called McSorley's, which has been in continuous existance since 1846 or so. They have framed newspaper articles on the wall from over a hundred years ago, 130 year old pictures, political campaign buttons from McKinley's run. Talk about a neat experience.
Actually seeing the old print would mean more to me. I rather hope that they serve images of the old papers, not just the computer-read text. But hey, that's just me.
...I'm not so sure about the significance of the content, what did they write/read in 19th Century?...
What they named news at their time is what we call history right now.
Your head a splode
and copyright restrictions are in force on papers published after 1923
in case anyone was still left who thought copyright laws were reasonable....
Actually, (having done a little historical research myself) those kinds of things are relatively easy to find. (church and public records)
In general, the most interesting stuff is often the stuff which was the least interesting when the newspaper was published, such as advertisments, expressions and figures-of-speech in the articles, opinion pieces, the style of reporting, the biases.
All these little things that generally convey the atmosphere and mindset of an age. It's easy to find out facts, like the construction date of a factory. It's more difficult to find out what people were thinking about the new factory.
Why would it be any different just because it's online?
In the online world, it is completely impossible to show somebody something without similtaneously giving them a copy of that same something. If the library shows you a html version of the copyrighted work, then it had to do so by sending you the contents of that work as a second digital copy, independant of the copy that's on their hard drive. If the library shows you a GIF image of the copyrighted work, then it hd to do so by sending you the contents of that work. No matter what scheme is used, no matter what technique for encryption is used, the fact of the matter is that at some point, even if just temporarily, your computer has to have its own copy in one way or another.
On the other hand, if I show you a physical book, this doesn't cause two seperate copies of the book to appear.
Unless the online library is willing to delete their copy (even from backups and from the hard drive) while you have your copy (and then trust you to send it back to them when you are done or pay them for it if you lose it), then there cannot be a working analogy between online and physical libraries as far as copyright law goes. Even someone not intending to make use of their copy is still technically breaking copyright law every time they look at a copyrighted work. Your browser's cache is filled with copyright violations if you've ever visited any website with any copyrighted content recently (which is most people who surf the web, probably).
The problem is that the original law was not written with this technology in mind, and the attempts to update it are written by people who just don't understand what they're doing, don't understand how the technology works, and aren't listening to those who do, and instead are listening to those with a vested interest in lying to them about the issue. Hence we get laws that if interpreted literally would outlaw the entire world wide web, but then get enforced selectively. (ALWAYS a bad situation to be in, where it is nearly impossible to avoid violating a law - then the law becomes a means to randomly smack-down on people for whatever you wish to discriminate against them for.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
All digitally enhanced and edited to give you a better happier feeling of your government
The LoC would have their reputation destroyed among the librarian and researcher communities if they were caught doing that; and they would be, because hard-core researchers would notice any significant changes in the text and go back to the microfilm and original text copies.
Librarians tend to be among the strongest anti-censorship groups in America. There's never been any insinuation that the Library of Congress was having its strings pulled by the forces in power. I trust the Library of Congress to be a neutral provider of information much more then, say, the Washington Post or the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I can see a lot of places (libraries primary example) that will no longer carry or supply this type of information, because the government will supply it to us.
Most libraries are part of government. Why should you trust your home-town library more than the Library of Congress?