www.loc.gov
JSTORAcademic Paper Archive
www.jstor.org
The Avalon ProjectDocuments in Law, History and Diplomacy
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/
These are but a few of the thousands of sites that now offer historical
information on-line. It goes without saying that thousands more sites
will appear in the future.
FROM PAPER TO DIGITAL
Microfilm
Researching historic documents, particularly newspapers, has required
either having access to a collection of actual newspapers or to
microfilm of the collection. While convenient for libraries/archives,
microfilm is anything but convenient for research. The only way to find
anything on a reel of microfilm is to look at every frame. Many people
can barely take an hour, or two, of squinting at the screens of the
microfilm readers, before they complain of eye strain--or even sea
sicknessand have to call it a day. Once something of interest is
located on microfilm, either the researcher must make a copy using the
on-board printer or make notes via pen and paper.
While microfilm readers allow users to fast-forward or fast-reverse in
order to facilitate searching, they provide no ability to locate specific
information (text or pictures).
Scanners
A scanner is like a copy machine, but instead of copying paper to
paper, it scans paper or microfilm and converts it to digital format,
i.e., an electronic form that can be stored, read and manipulated by
computer.
Digital images (text and pictures) offer researchers the ability to access
documents remotely over the Internet. But even these electronic
documents require an image-by-image visual review to find specific
information.
Digitized page from the January 18, 1894 San Francisco Call
The Veridian software breaks scanned images into chunks, which are
presented to the user in the windows shown above. The right window
contains an image of an article. When a scanning error is found, the
text is corrected in the left window and then saved.
Over time, these individual corrections add up, and the text of the
digitized papers will match the originals. Any article can be
downloaded for inclusion in research materials (typically in a word
processor document).
THE CALIFORNIA DIGITAL NEWSPAPER COLLECTION
For people interested in California historyparticularly from a day-byday, boots-on-the-ground point of view newspapers providethere now
exists a very extensive collection of California newspapers on-line,
hosted by the Center for Bibliographic Studies and Research at UC
Riverside. This collection contains over 73,000 issues comprising over
600,000 pages and over 6.8 million articlesdating from 1846 until
1922 (intellectual property published after 1922 is generally protected
by US copyright law).
This collection is supported in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and
Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and
Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.
Source Newspapers
The California Digital Newspaper Collection contains over forty
historical papers. While many of the papers were short-lived, some
were published for decades, including:
Los Angeles Herald (Los Angeles, 1873-1910)
Weekly Alta California (San Francisco, 1849)
Sacramento Daily Union (Sacramento, 1851-1899)
San Francisco Call (San Francisco, 1890-1913)
Pacific Rural Press (San Francisco, 1871-1922)
Marin Journal (San Rafael, 1861-1920)
Daily Alta California (San Francisco, 1849-1891)
Stanford Daily Archive Now Online
The Stanford Daily (originally the Daily Palo Alto) began publishing in
the Fall of 1892. Recently, the group Friends of the Stanford Daily
has been responsible for the digitizing of this publication, also using
Veridian as its digital management software.
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