Searchable digitized newspapers from the NDNP

[Bob Russell]

It looks like a lot of 100 year old U.S. newspapers are being digitized and made available free of cost as a part of the National Digital Newspaper Program.

"The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) is a partnership between the NEH and the Library of Congress to provide enhanced access to United States newspapers. Ultimately, over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet."

This Chronicaling America prototype was launched in March, 2007 with newspaper pages from 1900 to 1910 from the following states: California, District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, and Virginia.

By the way, you might find some really interesting serious political news stories like this one about how the Washington Times reports on how "William Howard Taft, the secretary of war who would go on to win the presidency the following year, is 'not so large as rumored.'”

The pages are available both in flash and html formats. A great resource. It's too bad we couldn't expand it to all major papers through the year 2000. And don't try to convince me that copyright protection of newpapers farther back than 2000 is necessary and good for consumers - that's going to be a very hard sell!

From the Library of Congress blog via Improbable Research.