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."
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.
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.
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?