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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."
What is the law regarding an online library? I guess not even the government can do it.
The local library has every edition of the local papers on microfilm, and I suppose they could put it all on DVD too.. When does it become a copyright issue?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Many newspapers charge obscene fees to access articles more than a week old, yet provide free of charge to library patrons access to their entire archive electronically.
The span of the joint project is limited because type faces of printers used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read
Surely the OCR process could be recalibrated to identify a different typeface ?
Now, where is the open source OCR software that they can use to read the old wonky typefaces?
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
We already have 20 million.
I was wondering if anybody could justify news being under copyright for that long. What is there for a newspaper to gain by holding such long copyrights?
... and for once, it's interesting.
To most Americans, the period from 1790 to 1915 is kind of a mystery except for Gettysburg and the Ford Theater.
There was tremendous growth in the number of newspapers during that period, starting at a handful in 1790 to thousands in the 1920's. They fell on hard times with the advent of radio.
During that time, everyone with a spare nickel and a desire to publish something put out their own rag. They would trade stories, publish letters to each other, have flame wars, etc. I think it must have looked a lot like the blogosphere, with a bit more latency.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Sometimes, we need to see the old news to recall that.
sigs, as if you care.
Too bad they aren't scanning newspapers from say the revolutionary war period. I think it would have been really interesting to read the war and the general thoughts about it at the time.
I'm sure OCR technology will advance quickly enough to allow the scanning of these newspapers.
My library had the NY Times on microfilm so I decided it would be interesting to look up famous dates. I checked Dec 7 1941 but there was no article on Perl Harbor. Figuring with the time difference and printing times it didn't make it I checked Dec. 8th. Still nothing. Gradually over the next few days the story began to trickle out that "yes, something happened", "a few ships were damaged", "quite a few ships were damaged". It was a week later before the story was consistant with what we now believe happen. Very different from the "Live from the field" news of today. I have been present at two events that made it into the newspaper. In neither case could I even recognize the article as describing the same event.
It'll be a big help to me personally!
I work as a research assistant, which involves a great deal of time going through libraries and copying old journal articles (and I get paid, too, can you believe that?)
Eight or nine months ago I was looking stuff up for my professor's book on the history of the death penalty in the United States, and she had me track down an article from the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American on an outlaw named John Long, who was hanged in Mississippi in 1870. No library in New England archives the Hattiesburg American--not even Harvard or the Athenaeum--so in the end I had to call the Hattiesburg Public Library and ask the librarian to make me a photocopy of that article.
(We had a hard time understanding each other--I had to spell out the name "John Long" because my Boston accent confused her. I had the same problem in South Carolina when I asked the gas station attendant what town I was in. It was Summerton, which she pronounced something like "Suhhhn't'n"--eventually she had to point to it on a map.)
Believe me, this project could save me a lot of backache and eyestrain. Looking through six months of the New York Times from 1899 on microfilm because some footnoter wasn't more specific than "late 1899" is no joke.
Technically, it's us folks at Distributed Proofreaders that do the dirty work of fixing OCR problems. ;-)
I've done over a thousand pages since it's started... It's gotten really easy for me to pump out pages, and I've been turned on to alot of different information that I'd normally not expose myself too... It's quite enriching -- so you should try it if you got time!
Perspective is to Science what Interpretation is to Religion. Obama + Paul FTW
Presumably papers after 1923 will be added one year at a time as the copyright expires?
The Mickey Mouse Protection Act,(aka Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act) tacked on an immideate and retroactive 20 years to copyright length. So, don't look for anything to be entering the public domain until 1/1/2019. And that's not even considering the likelyhood of Congress extending the length of copyrights again.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Ads today are complete rubbish. Even looking back at ads from the 80`s in pcmagazine, they were a lot better then. Back then they would tell you the actual benefits and features of a product. Now you get a picture of the sky, with a window and a question, "where do you want to go today?". I want to know what I'm buying, and I don't think its an artists rendition of utopia, its a computer program.
"brxref
Mickey Mouse is keeping us from reading newspapers from the great depression? How powerful should one rat be?
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
Very interesting stuff indeed. I especially liked the description of the Anteater, or "Manis" as they called it, from India in the Gentleman's Magazine (n. Unfortunately, the poor animal was kept in the guys room and he didn't know to feed it ants. Eventually it climbed out the window and fell to its death. Interesting to hear a supposedly scientific analysis of the animal though.