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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.
If the Library of Congress is entirely digitized, that's going to totally screw up the "burning Libraries of Congress" measurement of energy output.
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?
We already have 20 million.
The fact that you have no idea what people wrote or read about shows the importance of making the materials more accessible.
(From the digitized 1844 paper...)
Howdy, pardner! To read about that scalliwag Black Bart's shootout with Arizona Jack last week, you'll need to pay two bits per article or buy a subscription for a gold dollar or its equivalent in salt pork or live chickens.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
"Purfuit of Happineff"
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.
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....
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?