“This site allows you to search and read newspaper pages from 1900-1910 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).” – Related Library of Congress page (via Librarians Internet Index).
The TeleRead take: If you like panning around newspaper pages with an old microfilm machine, then you’ll love the horrid interface from Chronicling America. This collection begs to be scanned into genuine text, augmented by images when you want to see them—as opposed to the present approach. Not to pick on the creators of the online exhibit. While U.S. pols splurge on pork, efforts like this can get only so much funding. I’d rather see the money go for treats such as a profile of the Wright Brothers by the editor of a hometown newspaper. I used “Kitty Hawk” (the two words next to each other) as my search term. Maybe we need to place digital history projects under the bloated Department of Homeland Security; after all, a sense of who we are is part of “security” (a concept true outside the States, too—lest TeleBlog readers elsewhere feel neglected!).
Since I’m partially sighted, readability is an issue for me as well, so I’d like to point out that the site offers the additional options of an HTML text, a JPG download, and a PDF download.
From the point of view of doing research, only having the HTML text plus pictures wouldn’t be helpful. Quite often the placement and size of the text tells quite as much about the story as the text content does. However, I applaud the Library of Congress for providing an HTML version of the text as an alternative. If it had the funding to offer scanned text that was a bit cleaner, I’d be happier, but this is a lot more than most research sites provide.
Big thanks for bringing up the text options, Dusk. I can’t get into the LOC site now but will try ’em out when I can. Meanwhile I wonder if the options couldn’t be more conspicuous. – David