Online Newspaper Sites Terms of Use, Newspaper Copyright, and the Google News Archive

This past week, I've come across some tremendous resources that will be of help to those doing research in online historical newspapers.

The first include three articles from The Legal Genealogist's blog:

"Looking at the news sites" - this article compares the terms of use of three major online historical newspaper websites, Newspapers.com (the newest member of the Ancestry.com family), GenealogyBank.com, and NewspaperArchive.com. This is important information to understand should you be using their digitized newspaper images.

"Copyright & the news reprint" - Judy Russell discusses copyright and public domain and how that affects using digitized newspaper images of whole newspaper pages as well as copies of hard copy newspapers

"Copyright & the newspaper article" - here's more detail about copyright laws and newspaper articles in particular

You can also search The Legal Genealogist's blog for copyright law as it pertains to obituaries, another newspaper-related topic.

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A new genealogy blog made its debut this week, the Enhanced News Archive. This blog is devoted to the topic of Google News Archive. If you've spent any time at the Google News Archive site, you'll find that unfortunately, all the digitized newspapers are listed alphabetically by title only and there is no easy way to determine if any of those papers came from your ancestral locations. Jose Munoz, of Enhanced News Archive has composed two extremely helpful lists. One is the Enhanced News Archive List with Locations in which he has listed all the locations of all the newspapers found at Google News Archive. The second is the Table of States 2, which lists all the American newspapers at Google News Archive by their location. The post "USA Only - Enhanced Newspaper Archive List"--despite its name--has downloads in Microsoft document form of both lists.

These lists are extremely helpful in determining whether your ancestral locations have newspapers digitized at Google News Archive. Jose did inform me that there were some general, rather than specific, locations listed and I did find a couple minor errors--Yukon Territory (part of Canada) being listed under Alaska, for instance--but as a whole, these are amazing resources and a great deal of work and time were expended creating them. I ought to know, as I've only started adding the titles beginning with the letter "B" to my Online Historical Newspaper site!

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I trust these two blogs will be of great assistance in your newspaper research!