Newspapers are a Wonderful Source of Information



Obituary

The following information was gleaned from a RootsTech class presented by Kathleen Murray, PHD and Tara Carlisle, M.A., M.S..

Two freely available newspaper archives, Chronicling America at the Library of Congress and The Portal to Texas History at the University of North Texas.

Chronicling America Chronical America Website

Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages. Supported by NEH, this rich digital resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress.

The Portal to Texas History℠ [http://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/TDNP/]

The Portal is a gateway to Texas history materials. From prehistory to the present day, its unique collections from Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, genealogical societies, and private family collections, provide researchers with primary source materials. The University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries maintains the Portal, which includes the Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP) collection. The UNT Libraries is the lead institution in Texas selected for the National Digital Newspaper Program, Chronicling America. TDNP is a partnership providing broad geographic access to digitized Texas newspapers as far back as 1829. It currently includes 80,486 newspaper editions (618,619 files).

Types of Information

·         Births and deaths

·         Marriage announcements

·         Military Service

·         Land purchases

·         Promotions

·         Advertisements: Family businesses

·         Travel announcements

Sources:

Bekaert, J., Van De Ville, D., Rogge, B., Strauven, I., De Kooning, E., Rik Van de, W. (2002). Metadata-based access to multimedia architectural and historical archive collections: A review. Aslib Proceedings, 54(6), 362-371.

Holley, R. (2009). How good can it get? Analysing and improving OCR accuracy in large scale historic newspaper digitisation programs. D-Lib Magazine, 15(3/4). Retrieved from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march09/holley/03holley.html

Klijn, E. (2008). The current state-of-art in newspaper digitization: A market perspective. D-Lib Magazine, 14(1/2). Retrieved from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january08/klijn/01klijn.html

Maxwell, A. (2010). Digital archives and history research: feedback from an end-user. Library Review, 59(1), 24-39. DOI (Permanent URL): 10.1108/00242531011014664

Robinson, L. (2010). The evolution of newspaper digitization at the Washington State Library. Microfilm and Imaging Review, 39, 24-27.

Thurlow, I. & Warren, Paul. (2008). Deploying and Evaluating Semantic Technologies in a Digital Library. In J. Davies, M. Grobelnik, & D. Mladenić (Eds.), Semantic Knowledge Management (pp. 181-198). Berlin: Springer.

Warwick, C., Galina, I., Rimmer, J., Terras, M., Blandford, A., Gow, J., & Buchanan, G. (2009). Documentation and the users of digital resources in the humanities. Journal of Documentation, 65(1), 33-57.

National Digital Newspaper Program

More information on program guidelines, participation, and technical information can be found at http://www.neh.gov/projects/ndnp.html or http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/