Digital Newspapers Available by Next Spring

[unionblue]

From the publication/newspaper, The Civil War Courier, August 2005-Volume 21 Issue 8:

Digital newspapers could be available by next spring.

Richmond, VA--The effort to digitize Civil War era newspapers is picking up steam and hopefully by next spring students of the Civil War will have access to information once available only to scholars.

The U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Science gave a $478,000 grant to finance the two-year effort that brought together the University of Richmond, the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia, and Tufts University and started the process of putting the antique newspapers into digital form.

Officials say they are using an old-fashioned keyboard process to bring the papers into the digital age and avoid the murkiness and hard-to-read qualities often associated with microfilm.

Then a computer comparison of the two texts will be used to produce the most accurate version. The University of Richmond says one of its goals is to also create many access points in the computer program so readers can launch searches for specific information.

I don't know about the rest of the members of this board, but this excites me as a whole new research area on questions we have posed to each other over many areas and threads on this board. I can hardly wait to see what this new areas of research this rich, new source will open up to all of us here.

Submitted by,
Unionblue

[scone]

I agree Neil should be interesting.

steven