Sunday, May 22, 2011

News from Google News Archive and Chronicling America

 Google News Archive is ending their newspaper digitization project:
We work closely with newspaper partners on a number of initiatives, and as part of the Google News Archives digitization program we collaborated to make older newspapers accessible and searchable online. These have included publications like the London Advertiser in 1895, L’Ami du Lecteur at the turn of the century, and the Milwaukee Sentinel from 1910 to 1995.

Users can continue to search digitized newspapers at http://news.google.com/archivesearch, but we don’t plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing. [Hat tip to John D. Reid of Anglo-Celtic Connections]

A link to browse individual historical titles is at http://news.google.com/newspapers, and from there you can search the individual newspaper. I will continue to add these titles to my Online Historical Newspapers website. It does take time, and I am currently nearly finished with the titles beginning with the letter A.

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Meanwhile, the Library of Congress' Chronicling America project continues in full swing:
Last week, the Library of Congress updated the Chronicling America Web site with more than 230,000 additional newspaper pages in various titles. The site now provides access to more than 3.7 million searchable newspaper pages from 506 newspaper titles, published in 22 states and the District of Columbia between 1860 and 1922.

These titles are also being added and updated on my site. Keeps me busy!

Saturday, April 16, 2011

México and Ciudad de México New Pages

Here are the new pages of links to Mexico Online Historical Newspapers:

Mexico - with one out of 31 states and one federal district linked

Ciudad de México - with one new link to Google News Archive

Australia, Australia Capital Territory, New South Wales, Northern Terrritory, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia New Pages

Here are the new pages of links to Australia Online Historical Newspapers:

Australia - with eight out of nine states/territories linked

Australia Capital Territory - with two new titles from Australia Trove

New South Wales - with 24 new titles from Australia Trove

Northern Territory - with seven new titles from Australia Trove

Queensland - with 13 new titles from Australia Trove

South Australia - with nine new titles from Australia Trove

Tasmania - with 14 new titles from Australia Trove

Victoria - with one new title from Google News Archive and three new titles from Australia Trove

Western Australia - with 11 new titles from Australia Trove

Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Québec New Pages

Here are the new pages of links to Canada Online Historical Newspapers:

Canada - with three out of 13 provinces/territories linked

New Brunswick - with one title from Google News Archive

Nova Scotia - with one title from Google News Archive

Ontario - with one title from Google News Archive

Québec - with 29 titles from Google News Archive

Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington New Pages and Updates

I have been adding quite a bit of links to the website the past four months, but have not taken the time to list the new pages and updates. It really is amazing how many digitized newspapers are out there, and how quickly various institutions, organizations, and businesses are adding more and more to the Internet each week!

New Pages

Idaho - with three titles from Google News Archive

Indiana - with two titles from Google News Archive

Iowa - with six titles from Google News Archive

Rhode Island - with one new title from Google News Archive


Updates

Alabama - one new title from Google News Archive

Arizona - updated three titles from the Library of Congress with more years of coverage; added two new titles from the Library of Congress, and one new title from Google News Archive

Florida - one new title from the University of Florida and three new titles from Google News Archive

Georgia - one new title from Google News Archive

Illinois -  one new title from Google News Archive

Kansas - 13 new titles from the Library of Congress and 39 new titles from GenealogyBank

Louisiana - five new titles from Google News Archive

Maryland - six new titles from Google News Archive

Michigan -28 new titles: one from the Commerical Record, seven from Google News Archive, 13 from GenealogyBank, two from Footnote, one from the Salem-South Lyon Digital Archives, two from the Rawson Memorial Library, one from the Making of Modern Michigan, and one from the Ann Arbor District Library

Montana -  two new titles from Google News Archive

North Carolina - three new titles from Google News Archive

Ohio - one new title from Google News Archive

Oklahoma - three new titles from Google News Archive

Pennsylvania - three new titles from Google News Archive

Texas - one new title from Google News Archive

Washington - one new title from Google News Archive

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Online Historical Newspapers Galore!


If searching through online historical newspapers for your ancestors and relatives to enhance your family tree is a fun past time, you'll be excited to hear that two major online historical newspaper websites made some great changes this week. And to sweeten the news, both resources offer the digitized newspapers for FREE!

First off, I happened to be working on my Online Historical Newspaper site, adding historic titles from Google News Archives from a .pdf file that one of my website users had kindly put together and sent me. The frustrating thing about Google News Archives is that up until recently, you could not easily find historic titles on their site. Article searches would produce results that included both current news articles (single article in text format only and most being pay-for-view) and historic articles (digitized whole historical newspapers - free to view). There was no comprehensive list of the digitized whole historical newspapers, so you usually only found a historic title if you knew the name of the paper and did a comprehensive search. If you were looking to find a historic title for an ancestral location, but did not know if one existed for that area, or what its title was, you pretty much were out of luck.

That changed this week. While I was working on my site and looking at one of the digitized historic titles I was lucky enough to find, I noticed a link in the upper right corner of the page: "Browse all newspapers." My initial thought was that this would simply take me back to the Google News site, with mostly current, pay-for-view titles. But to my surprise, it was a comprehensive linked list of all the historic titles in Google News Archive, with the dates of coverage!

I have only two beefs with this list: the first is that it does not list publication location of these titles; you must go in and view the paper and find the location on its masthead. The second is that you cannot download the pages or print from the site. You can, however, use your computer's Print Screen function. I hope to cover that in another post.

The second major website is the Library of Congress' Chronicling America site, which made the following announcement this week:
On December 15, 2010, the Library of Congress added more than 440,000 historic newspaper pages to the Chronicling America Web site. This most recent update expands date coverage for many titles already represented in the site and includes a wealth of content in new titles from Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. The site now includes more than 3.1 million pages from 414 titles published between 1860 and 1922 in 22 states and the District of Columbia.

Since I have already added many of the Chronicling America titles to my Online Historical Newspapers site, I went in to take a closer look. On average, most of the changes are expanded years to existing titles and one or two more new titles for each state. Of course, all this is a good thing!

I am working hard to add all these new titles and updated expansions of years to my Online Historical Newspapers site, and hope the site will prove useful to your research by facilitating and narrowing your hunt!

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Alabama, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Montana, New York, and Washington New Pages and Updates

I have been adding new information to the website, but have neglected to send out updates. Here's what's new:

New Pages

Alabama - with one title from Google News Archive

Connecticut - with five titles from Google News Archive

Delaware - with one title from Google News Archive

Montana - with one title from the Montana Memory Project

Louisiana - with six titles from the Library of Congress


Updates

United States - now with the District of Columbia and 31 out of 50 states linked

California - one new title from Google News Archive; new county added: Butte

Florida - three new titles from Google News Archive

Illinois - 49 new titles: one from the Quincy Public Library, 37 from GenealogyBank, seven from Footnote, one from the Chicago Public Library, two from the UIUC Historical Newspapers Online, and one from the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection. New counties include Clinton, Douglas, Fayette, Gallatin, Hancock, Logan, Madison, Marion, Menard, Moultrie, Piatt, Rock Island, Sangamon, St. Clair, and Winnebago.

Michigan - one new title from Google News Archive; new county added: Shiawassee

New York - six new titles: two from Old Fulton on New York Postcards and four from the Rochester Regional Library Council

Washington - ten new titles: two from Google News Archive, one from the Washington Secretary of State, and seven from the Library of Congress. New counties include Benton and Kittitas.