LOC releases online historic newspapers

[s***@gmail.com]

My archivist daughter at the National Library of Medicine has passed
along information about yesterday's release of a new searchable
historic newspaper collection. Some lessons could have been learned
from Proquest, which has sharper images and which prints newspaper
name, date, and page number on the page with the printed article.
Nonetheless, after experimenting with the search features for only a
half hour, I can attest to the research benefits of this new resource,
which offers historic newspapers previously unavailable online.

Read the website release announcement below for the current scope and
long-term plans.

Sue Attalla


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
101 Independence Avenue SE
Washington DC 20540
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: ***@loc.gov

March 21, 2007
Contact: Guy Lamolinara, Library of Congress [phone];
***@loc.gov Elissa Pruett, National Endowment for the Humanities
(202)
606-8671

AMERICANS CAN READ THE NEWS BEFORE IT WAS HISTORY ON NEW WEB SITE
"Chronicling America" Offers Historic Newspapers from Six States and
D.C. in First Release

The Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
today announced that "Chronicling America: Historic American
Newspapers"
is debuting with more than 226,000 pages of public-domain newspapers
from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia and the
District of Columbia published between 1900 and 1910. The
fully-searchable site is available at www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/.

"Chronicling America" is produced by the National Digital Newspaper
Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress created to develop an
Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with select
digitization of historic pages as well as information about newspapers
from 1690 to the present. Supported by NEH's "We the People" program
and
Digital Humanities Initiative, this rich digital resource will
continue
to be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of
Congress.

Over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national,
digital resource of historically significant newspapers published
between 1836 and 1922 from all U.S. states and territories. Also on
the
Web site, an accompanying national newspaper directory of
bibliographic
and holdings information directs users to newspaper titles in all
formats. The information in the directory was created through an
earlier
NEH initiative. The Library of Congress will also digitize and
contribute to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper
pages
drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership.
For the initial launch the Library of Congress contributed more than
90,000 pages from 14 different newspaper titles published in the
District of Columbia between 1900 and 1910.

"The Library congratulates all the partners in this extraordinary
program to make historic newspapers available through our Web site,"
said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. "The National Digital
Newspaper Program provides access to one of our best sources of
information about what was considered important to Americans at a
given
point in time."

"'Chronicling America' will allow students, teachers, historians -- in
fact, all Americans -- access to some of our most important historical
documents. It is one thing to read about historical events from the
perspective of historians, narrated with the value of hindsight. It is
entirely different to read the story as it was happening," said NEH
Chairman Bruce Cole. "'Chronicling America' will be available to the
American public for free, forever; and I hope Americans will visit the
site and try to imagine the emotions and actions of their forebears as
those stories went to print."

The following six institutions received the first NDNP grants to
digitize papers in their respective states from the first decade of
the
20th century:

* University of California, Riverside, $400,000;
* University of Florida Libraries, Gainesville, $320, 959;
* University of Kentucky Research Foundation, Lexington, $310,000;
* New York Public Library, New York City, $351,500;
* University of Utah, Salt Lake City, $352,693; and
* Library of Virginia, Richmond, $201,226.

New NDNP awardees will be announced later this summer.

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. Its more
than 134 million items -- books, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts,
maps, photographs, films, sound recordings and digital materials - are
accessible through its 21 reading rooms on Capitol Hill. The Library's
newspaper collections have grown to comprise more than 1 million
current
issues, more than 30,000 bound historical volumes and more than
600,000
microfilm reels.

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National
Endowment
for the Humanities supports learning in history, literature,
philosophy
and other areas of the humanities. NEH grants enrich classroom
learning,
create and preserve knowledge, and bring ideas to life through public
television, radio, new technologies, museum exhibitions, and programs
in
libraries and other community places.

[s***@gmail.com]

Since posting this Library of Congress Chronicling America
announcement and link yesterday, I see that my comment about not
printing source documentation on the same page was only partly
correct. Of the 21 articles I have printed, 3 printed with the source
citations on the same page, but 18 printed with citations on separate
pages. I've ruled out the newspaper itself causing the difference
since two of the articles with citations printed on the page with the
article are from the same Washington, DC paper as several of the
articles with citations printed on separate pages.

If anyone else encounters this difference and figures out the cause,
please post your explanation. If there's a way to avoid stapling and
wasting paper, I'd like to know.

In about two hours, I've come across such items as advertisements for
the U.S. Marine Band's performance of my great grandfather Wm.
Christopher O'Hare's rag "Levee Revels" and the 15th Cavalry Band's
performance of "Cottonfield Capers," the date of his grandmother Anne
Shreve O'Hare's death, many of the singing activities of his youngest
sister Nellie, either his father or his brother George's driving two
horses to death from heat exhaustion, and the explosion of a lantern
used to heat the O'Hare chicken coop, resulting in the incineration of
300 chickens and 3 brooders of chicks.

In the Washington Post, available separately through ProQuest, I've
come across such news as W.C. O'Hare's graduation from business
college, his participation in a literary/dramatic society, his band's
playing at a black school's commencement, a family shoplifting scandal
that resulted in a two-year lawsuit and $10,000 compensation for a
bodily search conducted by a prestigious department store's floor
detective, and the story of how an O'Hare in-law robbed his own son of
the boy's rightful inheritance after the boy's mother died and the
O'Hare family estate was sold. Interestingly, my North Carolina
cousin, whose grandfather had been that boy, did not know what his
great grandfather had done but knew the final outcome: years later,
the wronged son sued his father for the Richmond, VA home bought with
money that should have been the son's . . . and won.

Nothing that will revolutionize ragtime scholarship, but good fun and
all but that last information from online newspaper collections.

Sue Attalla

http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/

Post by s***@gmail.com
My archivist daughter at the National Library of Medicine has passed
along information about yesterday's release of a new searchable
historic newspaper collection. Some lessons could have been learned
from Proquest, which has sharper images and which prints newspaper
name, date, and page number on the page with the printed article.
Nonetheless, after experimenting with the search features for only a
half hour, I can attest to the research benefits of this new resource,
which offers historic newspapers previously unavailable online.
Read the website release announcement below for the current scope and
long-term plans.
Sue Attalla
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
101 Independence Avenue SE
Washington DC 20540
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
March 21, 2007
Contact: Guy Lamolinara, Library of Congress [phone];
(202)
606-8671
AMERICANS CAN READ THE NEWS BEFORE IT WAS HISTORY ON NEW WEB SITE
"Chronicling America" Offers Historic Newspapers from Six States and
D.C. in First Release
The Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
today announced that "Chronicling America: Historic American
Newspapers"
is debuting with more than 226,000 pages of public-domain newspapers
from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia and the
District of Columbia published between 1900 and 1910. The
fully-searchable site is available atwww.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/.
"Chronicling America" is produced by the National Digital Newspaper
Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress created to develop an
Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with select
digitization of historic pages as well as information about newspapers
from 1690 to the present. Supported by NEH's "We the People" program
and
Digital Humanities Initiative, this rich digital resource will
continue
to be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of
Congress.
Over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national,
digital resource of historically significant newspapers published
between 1836 and 1922 from all U.S. states and territories. Also on
the
Web site, an accompanying national newspaper directory of
bibliographic
and holdings information directs users to newspaper titles in all
formats. The information in the directory was created through an
earlier
NEH initiative. The Library of Congress will also digitize and
contribute to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper
pages
drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership.
For the initial launch the Library of Congress contributed more than
90,000 pages from 14 different newspaper titles published in the
District of Columbia between 1900 and 1910.
"The Library congratulates all the partners in this extraordinary
program to make historic newspapers available through our Web site,"
said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. "The National Digital
Newspaper Program provides access to one of our best sources of
information about what was considered important to Americans at a
given
point in time."
"'Chronicling America' will allow students, teachers, historians -- in
fact, all Americans -- access to some of our most important historical
documents. It is one thing to read about historical events from the
perspective of historians, narrated with the value of hindsight. It is
entirely different to read the story as it was happening," said NEH
Chairman Bruce Cole. "'Chronicling America' will be available to the
American public for free, forever; and I hope Americans will visit the
site and try to imagine the emotions and actions of their forebears as
those stories went to print."
The following six institutions received the first NDNP grants to
digitize papers in their respective states from the first decade of
the
* University of California, Riverside, $400,000;
* University of Florida Libraries, Gainesville, $320, 959;
* University of Kentucky Research Foundation, Lexington, $310,000;
* New York Public Library, New York City, $351,500;
* University of Utah, Salt Lake City, $352,693; and
* Library of Virginia, Richmond, $201,226.
New NDNP awardees will be announced later this summer.
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world. Its more
than 134 million items -- books, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts,
maps, photographs, films, sound recordings and digital materials - are
accessible through its 21 reading rooms on Capitol Hill. The Library's
newspaper collections have grown to comprise more than 1 million
current
issues, more than 30,000 bound historical volumes and more than
600,000
microfilm reels.
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National
Endowment
for the Humanities supports learning in history, literature,
philosophy
and other areas of the humanities. NEH grants enrich classroom
learning,
create and preserve knowledge, and bring ideas to life through public
television, radio, new technologies, museum exhibitions, and programs
in
libraries and other community places.

[e***@gmail.com]

This is a great tool for locating articles, but I've been unable to
make satisfactory prints. Working from the primary document, the
prints are either too small or too faint. Using PDF, the printed
documents are too small or overflow beyond printable areas. I can
take a snapshot from PDF and create a legible file, but the file
doesn't print. I've downloaded a JP2 version but haven't been able to
find a reader/decompresser for it. Any suggestions?

Ed

[s***@gmail.com]

I'd been printing from the primary document and agree that many
enlarged images are faint and/or fuzzy. Although legible, they
couldn't be reproduced. I haven't had time to experiment with JP2,
and I know nothing about it. I'll try to find out something
tomorrow. Nevertheless, I've just had fairly good luck with two
methods of printing from PDF. You can control print size and avoid
overflow into non-printable areas if you follow either set of
directions.

Option 1: Open Word and the PDF file. Using the PDF selection tool,
highlight the article or what you estimate to be an appropriate
portion of a long article. (If you haven't done this previously, it
might take you a few tries to develop an eye for it.) Right click on
the highlighted area, and select SAVE IMAGE TO CLIPBOARD. Then paste
to Word. If you need to copy the remainder of a long column, you can
paste it beside the first, or if you are copying a multicolumn
article, you can past the lower portion of a lengthy article to a
second page. The printed copy is better than I was getting from the
primary document, but the procedure is cumbersome.

Option 2: Enlarge the PDF file to a comfortable reading size, click
the PDF printer icon, and select CURRENT VIEW rather than PAGE. (Set
PAGE SCALING to FIT TO PRINTER and make sure AUTO-ROTATE AND CENTER
is checked. Then print. When I did this, the result was acceptable
and better than with the primary document, but not reproduceable.

The first technique saves a large amount of printer ink because it
allows one to print only the selected article rather than everything
around it. Since the pasting goes quickly, I think its the better
option.

If you discover a better method, let us know.

Sue

[s***@gmail.com]

Everyone,

Thanks to the director of our Innovation Center on campus (a high-tech
center for faculty), here's a solution to Ed's JP2 question. These
are Rich Fox's instructions:

A good program to use is the AyeView image browser, viewer, converter,
which has reader/writer capability. The URL is <http://
www.ayeview.com>. You may wish to use the "Download AyeView and try
freely" option. Purchase later if you like it.

Use the try option/button when the registration screen opens. You
will have 30 days.

Steps to use are as follows:

1. Download your file to your PC (You'll see a list of acceptable
file formats on the website, including JP2. <http://www.ayeview.com/
formats.htm>)

2. In AyeView, use File Open from the Tools bar, and browse for your
saved file. The short cut key strokes are Ctrl+O.

3. Once you select the file name and press the OPEN button, it should
appear on your screen.

Note: The SAVE AS option does not work with the trial package. [When
I talked to Rich, he said that the purchased program will allow you to
save as a different file type.]

As you'll see, the program cost is $19.95.

Rich is a friendly, helpful guy, who would try to answer questions.
If you need to contact him, add his user name (first initial + last
name above) to tulsacc.edu.

Sue

[RsH]

A FREE viewer that works with JP2 images is IrfanView. Use Google to
search for it, download it and download all of the available plug-ins.
No fee for any of this and it is great with these images, and for
other images, putting together slide shows, and lots of other choices.
I've used it for years...

FWIW

RsH
-------------------------------------------

Post by s***@gmail.com
Everyone,
Thanks to the director of our Innovation Center on campus (a high-tech
center for faculty), here's a solution to Ed's JP2 question. These
A good program to use is the AyeView image browser, viewer, converter,
which has reader/writer capability. The URL is <http://
www.ayeview.com>. You may wish to use the "Download AyeView and try
freely" option. Purchase later if you like it.
Use the try option/button when the registration screen opens. You
will have 30 days.
1. Download your file to your PC (You'll see a list of acceptable
file formats on the website, including JP2. <http://www.ayeview.com/
formats.htm>)
2. In AyeView, use File Open from the Tools bar, and browse for your
saved file. The short cut key strokes are Ctrl+O.
3. Once you select the file name and press the OPEN button, it should
appear on your screen.
Note: The SAVE AS option does not work with the trial package. [When
I talked to Rich, he said that the purchased program will allow you to
save as a different file type.]
As you'll see, the program cost is $19.95.
Rich is a friendly, helpful guy, who would try to answer questions.
If you need to contact him, add his user name (first initial + last
name above) to tulsacc.edu.
Sue

[s***@gmail.com]

How odd. I had Irfanview on my former computer and never thought to
try it. My husband inherited that computer about a year ago when I
bought a new one, but it's a few steps away in another room. Come to
think of it, though, he reformatted the hard drive a while back . . .

One reason Rich recommended ayeview.com is that there's no need to
download plugins. However, free always sounds good.

Thanks.

Sue

[s***@gmail.com]

One more comment on the printing issue: Using the pdf snapshot tool,
we can select an individual article and print easily. When we click
on PDF printer icon, the Print Range should be "Selected graphic."
When I tried this morning, that was the default as was "Auto-Rotate
and Center." This is what I'm used to with other online newspaper
archives, but I don't understand what was going on when I tried this
earlier. I had a briefer toolbar. The word "Select" didn't show up
by the Selection tool as it does for me now, and I had no Snapshot
tool. Perhaps it was there all the time and didn't load properly on
that one earlier attempt to use PDF. As a result, I resorted to
Selecting and pasting into Word.

The only remaining difference I see between this archive and most
other major online newspaper archives (aside from the extra step of
needing to select PDF when others use PDF exclusively) is that these
newspapers were scanned in grayscale rather than black and white. As
a result, images aren't as sharp and require more ink when printed.

Sue Attalla

[Bill Edwards]

Hi Sue and all.

When I looked at the code on one article I located, I saw they were
using Flash, not PDF. Don't know if it is true for all the archives,
however it would explain why something was printing smaller, because
PDF generally does a full size print to a page, often expanding to the
paper size. So if you use A3 for example, you'll get more or less a
full-sized print of the Post from that time, not half size. Flash,
however, will print just the image, not the expanded image, at the
current zoom level within the view window. In reality, it just loads a
popup-preview with the image view for you to print.

I deal in imaging in my job, and have programmed all sorts of Adobe
Acrobat substitutes that work in multiple browser configurations, so I
know well the pitfalls that can happen with various modes of print,
particularly if conversion is not done at the server but rather the
client end. A good print program will go to the server to retrieve the
full resolution page. LoC did what they could with their budget. I
currently work with DoJ on viewing and printing of stored legal
briefs, and they all but abandoned Adobe and Flash because of these
inherent issues. We may yet get involved with an LoC contract on this
scope, although my company seems more gung-ho about defense. In any
case, I will pass what knowledge I have on this on to them, since it
would be in the interest of all to make the print capabilities match
the otherwise extraordinary value of this archive.

The link I was looking at (in Flash) was Ragtime As Old As Man:
http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/ndnp:583612/display.html?n=0&scope=fulltext&pageNum=1&currentSort=&mode=list

Of particular interest in this is the contention that animals have
natural rhythm (I have never studied or noted this, so I can't really
comment) and that many ragtime melodies were outright lifted from
Wagner airs. Really? I'd like some idea as to what, since I am less
familiar wiith Wagner than his predecessors, particularly Chopin and
Brahms who I have done extensive pianistic study on. I know Wagner
thinks he composed "rings" around them. Perhaps. But thought I had a
good handle on classical pieces gone ragtime (including two I have
composed). I think Arndt used a little, and off the top of my head,
perhaps Lenzberg in Operatic rag, but not so sure.

If anybody here can name something, that would be of interest. I know
(as per Ed Berlin) that people stole from - or heavily incorporated
their "research" of - Scott Joplin in both form and melody from time
to time. But usually the classical lifts - even the ubiquitous
Hungarian Rhapsody #2 - were usually pretty obvious.

Enjoy the article, and hope the info is useful. Bill E.

[s***@gmail.com]

You're right, Bill, that the default images are Flash. If you click
on the HTML option at the top of the page, you can find PDF and JP2.
The black DC papers are outstanding resources. For instance, using
the "exact phrase" option, try a search on Ernest Hogan. I've already
seen some interesting ragtime or ragtime-related items in the other
papers, too. However, I have student essays to read, so enough fun
for today.

Sue Attalla