Chronicling America includes newspapers from 1777-1963. Digital content is submitted via the National Digital Newspaper Program. State partners choose titles to digitize- not all states have the same dates/amount of content. It includes non-English newspapers.
Digitization is mostly from microfilm- old hard-copy papers are not in good shape. Optical character recognition can be bad for newspapers because original is bad- varies by title. OCR has improved since the project started, so not all newspapers are the same quality.
Searching tips:
- Browse calendar view to see what dates are available.
- Make sure you have dates and locations in addition to names, especially common names.
- When doing genealogy. think about why your ancestors would be in the newspaper.
- Death notices are not always in the same location.
- Papers sometimes had neighborhood news columns, but they can be hard to find- different names and locations.
- Stories sometimes use first and middle initials, titles like Mr/Mrs/Dr/Judge/Colonel/Reverend - married women by husband's name, no first name for children.
- Content is always being added, so it's worth it to check back.
- There is a clipping tool to just print/save the article you want.
- Click "Text" to download text- can put in a translation tool to get a rough translation.
- May have to use older terminology--e.g. "suffrage" vs "women's rights".
- Check a couple days after an event happens to see how a story evolves.
- Political cartoons are hard to find-hand-written text that OCR can't read, or no text- helps if you know cartoonists names- contact LOC, they have staff who can help.
- Topic guides are available.
- Each newspaper has a title essay with information about the paper.
Future plans:
- Correcting old OCR.
- Creating a way to search all African-American newspapers at once.
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Remember, newspapers are the "first draft of history" and are great primary sources for History Day and other research. A recording is available on using historical newspapers for History Day.
A recording of this webinar is available here.
Links from the Q & A are here.
--Andrea H. @GLCL
