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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."
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 fact that you have no idea what people wrote or read about shows the importance of making the materials more accessible.
"Purfuit of Happineff"
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 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?
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.