Digital Newspaper Archive Research

The special issue of the latest Media History (Volume 20, Number 1, 2014), devoted to digital newspaper archive research, grew out of a conference held at the University of Sheffield in 2011 of the AHRC (Arts and Humanities

Research Council) Research Network, Exploring the language of the popular in American and British newspapers 1833–1988.

As John Steel explains in the issue's Introduction, "The papers in this volume...signal developments and opportunities in the production, use and development of digital archives themselves. The papers either explicitly address the range of challenges and opportunities of using digital newspaper archives while at the same time presenting research made possible by the archives. Other papers are less evaluative or prescriptive and demonstrate the scope and depth of analysis that such archives allow for media historians."


Articles include: Elemental Forms: The newspaper as popular genre in the nineteenth century, by James Mussell

Nineteenth-Century Journalism Online—The Market Versus Academia? by Clare Horrocks

Jingoism, Public Opinion, And The New Imperialism: Newspapers and Imperial Rivalries at the fin de siècle, by Simon J. Potter

King Demos and His Laureate: Rudyard Kipling's ‘The White Man's Burden,’ Transatlanticism, and the Newspaper Poem, by John Lee

The development of discourse presentation in The Times, 1833–1988, by Andreas H. Jucker and Manuel Berger

Archiving the Visual: The promises and pitfalls of digital newspapers, by Nicole Maurantonio

New Televsion News Archive on the horizon

CommPilings posts are usually about resources; this one is about the promise of a resource. According to a recent story in Salon.com, the collecting obsession of a devoted Philadelphia-area librarian, Marion Stokes, may result in the largest television news archive to date--some 140,000 VHS tapes of network, cable, and local news programming between 1977 and 2012.  Librarian Roger Macdonald of the Internet Archive has taken on the collection which will be digitized and indexed for all. Not sure when it's slated for completion but the project has begun and, well, it's the Internet Archive (!) which already delivers a serachable database of the last four years of television news (2010-2013).

Of course the most famous television news archive is the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, a searchable abstracting service for national television network news broadcasts, 1968-present, with CNN and NBC broadcasts available as RealMedia video streams from 1998-present.  Unlike the Internet Archive initiative, it cannot post all of its footage online for free; researchers have to borrow clips on DVD for a small fee.

Communication scholars and historians certainly appreciate all of these archival efforts--it will be interesting to see the vision of Marion Stokes come to fruition, hopefully not too far from now. 

JTA Jewish News Archive

JTA, The Global News Service of the Jewish People, (formerly the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) has just launched a digital archive containing 250,000 articles dating from 1923.

A video about the archive is available here.

From the JTA press release:

The JTA Jewish News Archive, which is searchable and free for the public to use, was launched officially Tuesday, May 3 with a celebration at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

Highlights of the archive include extensive reporting from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s -- including perhaps the first article on what has become known as the Babi Yar massacre -- JTA’s reportage on the founding of the State of Israel, close and sustained coverage of the Soviet Jewry movement, and decades of articles chronicling the changing roles and responsibilities of Jewish women.

“The JTA Jewish News Archive has the potential to spark an interest in the past that will transform the future,” said Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University.

Sarna, a member of JTA’s board of directors, spearheaded the effort to digitally preserve the news agency's reporting.

JTA’s coverage of the Holocaust may be of particular interest to historians.

“There was and still is a lot of conventional wisdom that Americans didn't know about the Holocaust while it was happening, and couldn't have known about the Holocaust while it was happening," said Northeastern University journalism professor Laurel Leff. "One of the values of this archive is that people can actually look at the bulletins that JTA sent out during this period and see what information was, in fact, available."

Historical Washington Post

The latest big national national newspaper to be added to our digital historical newspaper offerings is The Washington Post, (1877-1993), Proquest Historical Newspapers. (Lexis Nexis and Newsbank carry the paper from 1977 to the present so no worries about access to the last couple decades). From the publisher:

Known for its comprehensive political reporting, first-rate photo essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writing, and unmatched investigative reporting, the historical Washington Post (1877-1993) is an unparalleled resource for today’s budding journalists, political historians, and students of government. The Post was the first newspaper in Washington to publish seven days a week. Early contributors included Joseph Pulitzer and a relatively unknown, un-bylined Theodore Roosevelt, who contributed stories about the West. Beginning in the 1940s, the newspaper featured editorial cartoonist Herbert L. Block (“Herblock”), who used his drawings to express indignation with political leaders and to “raise hell.” He coined the term “McCarthyism” in the 1950s and was unrelenting in his graphic characterization of Richard Nixon. This newspaper is perhaps most famous for a series of stories that began with a break-in at the Watergate office complex in 1972. When it was all over, reporters Woodward and Bernstein were household names, and President Nixon had resigned in disgrace.

As with all our Proquest Historical Newspapers (The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Defender, Chicago Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, Philadelphia Tribune, New York Amsterdam News, Times of India, and Wall Street Journal) one can not only view news articles but also photos, advertisements, marriage announcements, obituaries, cartoons, and more, for added context.

Introducing NewspaperCat

Nice news from a colleague at the University of Florida, announcing a new resource called NewspaperCat.

NewspaperCat is an online database providing links to over 1000 full-text digital newspapers in the United States and Caribbean. The project’s current coverage, which began with the Southeastern United States, is growing rapidly and will soon cover all fifty states. The purpose of NewspaperCat is to improve access to historical newspapers digitized by libraries, archives, historical societies and other non-profit organizations that remain buried within search engine returns such as Google PageRank. These newspapers represent a rich source of primary research material for researchers, students, and the general public. The project to build NewspaperCat was funded by the George A. Smathers Libraries and developed with the cooperation of the Digital Library Center of the University of Florida.

Harvard to Digitize 80,000 Hours Israel Broadcasting Authority Content

The Jerusalem Post (10/27/2020) reports:

The Israel Broadcasting Authority and Harvard University signed an agreement Tuesday to digitize 80,000 hours of recordings dating back to the pre-state period.

...History conscious people at the IBA were aware that the technology of yesteryear was fast becoming obsolete and unless the archives were transferred to a system compatible with today’s technology, they would continue to deteriorate and a great deal of valuable information about the development of the state, issues that transfixed or galvanized the nation, and, most important perhaps, the voices and images of national icons would disappear.

The problem, as always, was the cost factor. With its huge deficit, the IBA simply could not enter into a multi-million dollar arrangement.

But what may have spurred the IBA to risk at least part of the cost, was the damage done by water leaks and building faults to precious books, manuscripts and other documents stored in the archives of the National Library....

After long months of negotiations [three years] with Harvard, an agreement was reached whereby the IBA would transfer copies of some of its archives to Harvard, which would digitize them, keep one copy for the library of the university’s Judaica Department and send another copy to the IBA.

The process is due to begin next week, and Harvard, as under the previous agreement, will keep a copy for itself.

Keeping an eye on Google's digital newspaper archives

Google digitization goes forward unabated and that's great for newspaper backfiles. My good friend and colleague, Nick Okrent, over at Van Pelt sent me this list. These Google efforts, he writes, are "especially useful for the period that is post-Readex and pre-Lexis/Factiva. Here's a partial list...To take one interesting example, the Deseret News 1860-."

The US titles on this list can be found on Nick's Historical Newspapers Online research guide. For the Canada and Australia papers, just go into Google News and do a source search (in the Google box type: source:"Sydney Mail").

USA
1. Lodi Sentinel Lodi California 1900 – 2009

2. Bridgeport Morning News Bridgeport Connecticut 1880 – 1899

3. Day New London Connecticut 1880 – 2010

4. Hartford Weekly Times Hartford Connecticut 1840 – 1899

5. Meriden Daily Republican Meriden Connecticut 1865 – 1899

6. Sunday Morning Star Wilmington Delaware 1880 – 1989

7. Carroll Herald Caroll Iowa 1870 – 1929

8. Clinton Evening News Clinton Iowa 1880 – 1899

9. Clinton Morning Age Clinton Iowa 1894 – 1904

10. Aurora Daily Express Aurora Illinois 1882 – 1902

11. Crawfordsville Star Crawfordsville Indiana 1872 – 1899

12. Daily Argus News Crawfordsville Indiana 1886 – 1919

13. Kentucky New Era Hopkinsville Kentucky 1890 – 2009

14. Courrier De La Louisiane New Orleans Louisiana 1810 – 1859

15. New Orleans Commercial Bulletin New Orleans Louisiana 1830 – 1879

16. Boston Daily Evening Transcript Boston Massachusetts 1860 – 1879

17. Boston Evening Transcript Boston Massachusetts 1860 – 1919

18. Lewiston Daily Sun Lewiston Maine 1890 – 2010

19. Lewiston Evening Journal Lewiston Maine 1860 – 1979

20. Village Voice New York New York 1957 – 2004

21. Adams Centinel Gettysburg Pennsylvania 1800 – 1889

22. Gettysburg Compiler Gettysburg Pennsylvania 1860 – 1949

23. Pittsburgh Press Pittsburgh Pennsylvania 1880 – 1999

24. Reading Eagle Reading Pennsylvania 1860 – 2010

25. Republican Compiler Gettysburg Pennsylvania 1810 – 1889

26. Star and Sentinel Gettysburg Pennsylvania 1860 – 1959

27. Deseret News Salt Lake City Utah 1860 – 2010

28. Milwaukee Journal Milwaukee Wisconsin 1890 – 2010

29. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Milwaukee Wisconsin 1884 – 1995

CANADA
Victoria Daily Standard Victoria British Columbia 1870 – 1873

2. Saint John Daily Evening News Saint John New Brunswick 1860 – 1889

3. Public Ledger St. John's Newfoundland/Labrador 1820 – 1889

4. Morning Chronicle Halifax Nova Scotia 1840 – 1879

5. Huron Expositor Seaforth Ontario 1870 – 1899

6. Irish Canadian Toronto Ontario 1860 – 1899

7. Ottawa Citizen Ottawa Ontario 1860 – 2010

8. Ottawa Times Ottawa Ontario 1860 – 1879

9. Sarnia Observer Sarnia Ontario 1850 – 1909

10. Toronto Daily Mail Toronto Ontario 1881 – 1899

11. Canadian Illustrated News Montreal Quebec 1860 – 1889

12. Daily Witness Montreal Quebec 1870 – 1899

13. Montreal Daily Post Montreal Quebec 1885 – 1888

14. Montreal Daily Witness Montreal Quebec 1870 – 1879

15. Montreal Gazette Montreal Quebec 1860 – 2010

16. Morning Chronicle Quebec City Quebec 1840 – 1879

17. Quebec Daily Telegraph Quebec City Quebec 1880 – 1979

AUSTRALIA
1. Age Melbourne 1854 – 1989

2. Age Melbourne 1840 – 2010

3. Sydney Mail Sydney 1860 – 1939

4. Sydney Morning Herald Syndey 1820 – 2010

Chicago Tribune 1849-1986, and Other Newspaper News

The Chicago Tribune is the latest historical newspaper option to be added to the Penn Library website. This Proquest database will contain full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue on June 10, 1849 through 1986. Newsbank, also available on the Penn Library website, picks up recent years of the title, 1/1/1985 to the present.

Another newspaper option for those tilted toward more visual content analysis: you now have access to full-image page by page content for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, 2008-current. Historical access to full image content of these titles is also available in Proquest (in the same suite as The Chicago Tribune) but this fills the gap between "historical" image access and Lexis-Nexis, Factiva, or Newsbank article coverage for recent years that does not provide newspaper facsimiles.

Chinese news translations from FBIS

Penn Libraries has just added a very large collection of translated Chinese news sources in the latest update to the Foreign Broadcast Information Services 1974-1996 NewsBank collection. Here is the New & Noteworthy announcement from the Library homepage.

FBIS goes to China
The latest update to Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports 1974-1996 provides 790,752 news articles translated from Chinese news sources, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao.

FBIS Daily Reports are English-language translated media reports gathered from monitored broadcasts and publications in more than 50 languages. FBIS Daily Reports cover all newsworthy topics and they are invaluable sources of local information on both local events and world affairs.

The fulltext online FBIS Daily Reports are a collection in progress, being converted from microfiche and print originals. The collection is expected to be completed by Summer 2009. Status reports on the conversion process are provided at the NewsBank web site. Next up for release: Asia and the Pacific (APA) and East Asia (EAS).

The Penn Libraries owns the complete run of FBIS Microfiche and the online FBIS Daily Reports index - but the recently acquired online version offers more friendly access to those difficult formats.

Factiva now includes multimedia

You now have another option in addition to the Vanderbilt News Archive and AP Photo Archive for your audiovisual research needs: Factiva, goldmine of newspapers and business/media industry publications, has gone multimedia. Click on the Search 2.0 interface and perform any search and you'll see that the results screen now includes a multimedia link (in addition to pictures, web news and the regular newspapers, magazines, and newswire links). The extent of Factiva's video holdings is not entirely clear but the emphasis is, of course, on business and finance. From the "What's new" section of the the site:

"The new fully searchable audio and video content collection is oriented to news and business information, rather than user-generated content, and allows you to view relevant results via the Multimedia results tab. It includes: continuously updating content collection that will grow quickly to include more than 4,000 multimedia news and business sources and more than 300,000+ individual episodes, charts and graphs and a 90-day archive from leading publishers such as Dow Jones, NPR and the BBC."

The "90-day archive" signals a rather significant historical limitation. Something to keep in mind. Tooling around I found audio and video from Sunday news shows, the major US networks, Slate, YouTube, and sports talk radio. This is great but a little frustrating because there's no multimedia source list in sight which is what I'd really like to see.

The search engine uses speech-to-text technology to make it possible to search the text of programs. It neatly highlights your search terms and allows you to jump to that place in the program.

As for pictures, if you don't want to be limited to the Associated Press (AP Photo Archive) you can turn to Factiva which includes newswire photos from Reuters, McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder) and other international newswires.

VIP Report Compares Big Three Database News Vendors

A comparative product review of Thomson NewsRoom, LexisNexis and Factiva has just been published by VIP, a digital magazine published monthly for senior-level decision-makers responsible for the purchase of business information products and services. Each issue features in-depth, unbiased reviews of premium content products. To help customers choose among the major vendors, November's issue takes on "the big three" and compares them side-by-side in a detailed 43-page review.

The report compares , Factiva, LexisNexis, and Thomson's Newsroom in terms of news research capabilities--number of sources, analysis by subjects, type of publication, language, geography (including a table comparing numbers of sources for hard-to-find countries); length of archive, number of full-text items, number of abstracts, number of translated items; and timeliness (how long before an item becomes available online), among other factors. The same searches are carried out on all three services, and the results are analysed in terms of overlap, type of publication and more.

Among the key findings of the research are the following [this from the FreePint press release]:

• Language: Factiva is the most multi-lingual of all three services (offering 22 languages) against 16 for LexisNexis and 11 for NewsRoom.
• UK and US coverage: Coverage of UK newspapers is evenly spread across the three services.
• Asia Pacific coverage: Most of the major Asia Pacific newspapers are available across all three services. For some titles, LexisNexis offers a slightly older archive than Factiva.
• Latin American coverage: Factiva has a slight edge over the other two.
• Middle Eastern newspaper coverage: Three out of four sources are not available on NewsRoom. A deeper archive is available on LexisNexis than on Factiva.
• Web content: Web content is available on all three but it is not possible to distinguish web content from other published content on NewsRoom
• Multimedia content: Factiva is the only one of the three to offer multimedia content as part of its prime service.
• Company, industry and market data: Investext reports are no longer being updated on LexisNexis and NewsRoom.
• Indexing and updating: All three services provide detailed indexing but only Factiva and LexisNexis extend their updating to foreign- language documents.
• Language interfaces: Factiva.com offers the same nine language interfaces. NewsRoom offers a greater choice of interface languages than the old TBI service. LexisNexis has extended its number of interface language options and has new customised country interfaces for UK, US and Australia.
• Source lists: LexisNexis and Factiva both enable the user to create custom source lists.
• Search output: De-duplication when searching is a basic option on Factiva and NewsRoom but an irritating omission on Nexis. The ability to display all search results in KWIC format is a big plus for Nexis users, as is the automatic and useful sorting of results by format, subject, company, geography, language and people.

The issue containing the full report is available for purchase online .

Mideastwire.com

Just added to the Penn Libraries E-Resource collection: Mideastwire.com.

Mideastwire.com is an Internet-based news service that employs a team of translators around the region to gather important stories from and about the Middle East. Established in Beirut, Lebanon, it began offering services to paying clients in September 2005. It currently covers news from all 22 Arab countries, Iran, and the Arab media diaspora generally to span across the North Africa region as well as the UK and other countries that host Pan-Arab media.

An archive, which already contains thousands of briefs coded by subject categories (women, judicial, energy etc), specific news sources (Al Hayat, Al Jazeera, Al Quds Al Arabi etc), countries, general topics (opinion, business etc.) and keywords, is fully searchable.

For subscription access, be sure to enter this resource from the Penn Libraries homepage.

Keesing's World News Archive

From newsbreaks.infotoday.com, an article (below) on the Keesing World News Archive, a sort of indirect news archive in that it contains reports drawn from international newspaper resources.

As the site explains: Since 1931 Keesing’s has collected news reports on a daily basis from all over the world in a wide range of languages. Our editorial team, based in Cambridge, UK, takes this huge mass of raw data and refines and processes it into a series articles which we publish each month. These constitute a concise, accurate and unbiased account of important developments in each of the world’s countries, major international organisations and within selected thematic topics. Therefore, each monthly issue of Keesing’s Record of World Events accurately records, and objectively places within its immediate and historical context, the world’s most significant political, social and economic events by the end of the month following that in which they occurred."

Keesing's World News Archive Puts Web 2.0 into Practice
by Marydee Ojala

Keesing's World News Archive was launched at the International Studies Association annual meeting in Chicago last week, bringing 76 years of objective, well-written historical reporting online. It uses Squiz's open source content management system,
MySource Matrix (www.squiz.co.uk/mysource_matrix), to bring historical information into a Web 2.0 world. Keesing's is hardly a new company. Founded in 1931 in Amsterdam, it was strictly a print publisher for decades, which is not surprising for a company that predates both online and computers. What's impressive is the transformation made over the past 2 years in creating what
Keesing's deems a "History 2.0" product.

The content for Keesing's World News Archive comes from the company's 76 years of news monitoring. Keesing's is not a comprehensive gathering of every news story on a topic; it doesn't scrape news from the Web, ala Google or Yahoo! News. Instead, its editors select the most historically significant political, social, and economic events, extract critical information from worldwide news sources, and write concise reports.

These reports exist for the record, stripping bias away and correcting errors in the original press reports. If you insist upon print, you can still subscribe to Keesing's Record of World Events, the monthly news publication. Today, Keesing's produces 150 articles per month on average. All articles written in the past 76 years appear in the electronic Keesing's World News Archive, which currently contains about 95,000 articles online.

As a content provider, Keesing's enjoys a solid reputation. Its previous foray into putting content online occurred in 1999. That product used Folio to create a Keesing's info base. The interface, reviewed by Barbara Spruill in the February/March 2000 issue of EContent, offered keyword, Boolean, and advanced searching but was not user friendly for novice users. All that has changed with the launch of Keesing's World News Archive.

The home page puts Search the Archive at the top of the options on the left-hand side of the screen. Although it's not immediately obvious, entering multiple terms in the search box combines them with an implicit Boolean AND. There is no advanced search capability other than limiting by date. Search results can be sorted by date (ascending or descending) or by relevance. Thus far, a search on Keesing's seems rather traditional. But look closer. The system extracts key topics, people, nations, and tags to enable searchers to refine their searches and to see related entities quickly. You can view these either as a ranked list or as tag clouds. The only glitch is the "no selection" that appears first every single time, both in the list and in the tag cloud displays.

It's when you look at the full text of an article that Web 2.0 elements surface. At the bottom of the article, you will find a space where you can add your personal tags to the article and write notes. In the collaborative spirit of Web 2.0, you can share your tags and notes with other searchers. You can also search within the article, which is useful since search terms are not highlighted. You can create your own private portfolios. Keesing's press release on the new product says, "These connecting tags form the spine of the new site. They allow users to conduct precision searches, establish new associations between facts, and explore the connecting threads that run through … history."

Unlike more static information sources, Keesing's gives you the opportunity to complain about what you see on a page. If you choose to "Report a problem," which I did when I found typos on one page, you get an automated response promising a human follow-up. However, you don't get the Wikipedia-like option of actually editing a Keesing's article directly yourself. Despite the promise of immediate editorial attention, I'm still waiting for a contact from that promised human.

(Update: The error report I filed was, in fact, answered via email by a human and acted upon. The responder was apologetic and promised faster response time in the future.)

The power of user-generated tagging for historical events has exciting possibilities. Because Keesing's World News Archive is so new, tags are few and far between. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of the tagging function. Keesing's says it intends to add more of its own tags: One possibility is political parties. The best case scenario is that researchers will learn from each other while they absorb Keesing's historic content. The perceived linear nature of history, which is certainly the way it was taught to me in secondary school and at university, stands ready to be exploded by the collaborative nature of the Squiz technology applied to Keesing's archives. Searching the archives is not the only option at the home page. A Breaking History option appears directly under Search the Archive. This provides timelines on predefined topics, such as bird flu. If you want to know what the Keesing's folks are up to, click on the blog option, which has the somewhat peculiar icon of a manual typewriter. Why a picture of manual typewriters should trigger thoughts of blogs, I'm not quite sure, but the quaintness of it is somewhat appealing.

According to publisher, Jonathan Hixon, "This venture marks our entry into the world of collaboration with developers, researchers, historians, and, hopefully, other publishers. We developed our software on an open source content management system developed in Australia, which is now being looked at by other publishers and could well lead to more compatible and consistent platforms for data. We have helped to develop an innovative new tagging feature [that] encourages collaboration among thinkers from all over the world to draw relationships between the events, people, and places we have covered."

Signing up for an account is a prominent option. Back in 2000, subscriptions started at $1,000. With Keesing's World News Archive, the price is substantially more appealing. There's a day rate of $7.95, a monthly rate of $49, and an annual rate of $219. You can pay by credit card. Bringing the price down like this encourages ordinary people, as well as information professionals, to search Keesing's archive, to add tags, and to contribute to an ongoing conversation about history.

Marydee Ojala is the editor of ONLINE and a longtime online business researcher.