Library Unveils Newspaper Database Platform
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Indiana State Library has introduced an online platform allowing users access to the National Digital Newspaper Program's database. The library says the collection contains more than 14,000 issues and over 95,000 pages of content.
April 21, 2014
News Release
Indianapolis, Ind. — Three weeks after unveiling the new Indiana Memory, the Indiana State Library has now introduced the website's new Indiana Newspapers platform. Clicking on the “Indiana Newspapers” icon on Indiana Memory will take you to all of the newspapers digitized as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program.
This collection contains 14,214 issues comprising 95,455 pages and is continually growing. Many of these titles are also available at the Library of Congress' Chronicling America website. IDHNP provides free, online access to high quality digital images of Indiana's historic newspapers, links to online resources and assistance to other organizations in making their collections accessible. This online resource is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant enabled the Indiana State Library, in partnership with the Indiana Historical Society, to digitize Indiana newspapers for the National Digital Newspaper Program.
“We are moving ahead with digitizing another 100,000 newspaper pages as a continuation of the NEH grant,” said Chandler Lighty, Historic Newspaper Digitization Program Manager. “Over the coming months and year, historic digitized newspapers from South Bend, Evansville, and Vincennes will be available.”
The content on the Indiana Newspapers platform is being displayed in Veridian software, which is operated by the Indiana State Library and funded by the U. S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act. The crowd-sourcing component of Veridian allows you to register and make corrections to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) . For instance, if you find an individual’s name garbled in the OCR, you can correct it yourself, so that future users can find that person’s name in the newspapers easier.
“The software is really exciting because users like you can correct the OCR text,” said Lighty. “If you researched with any digitized content in the past, you may have discovered that the search results you received were often only as good as the OCR.”
Additionally, This week marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Digital Public Library of America (http://dp.la), a groundbreaking all-digital library that brings together millions of items from America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. In celebration, DPLA announced the addition of six major new partners, including Indiana Memory. DPLA anticipates the new partners will strengthen the geographic, cultural, and intellectual diversity of DPLA’s collections.
The Indiana Memory and DPLA partnership provides a built in mechanism for Indiana libraries, museums and historical societies to share their collections with the world. For the past five years, a growing number of organizations have contributed to Indiana Memory. Once the Indiana Memory content is uploaded to DPLA later this year, nearly 400,000 items relating to the history of Indiana will be able available through the broader lens of DPLA.
Follow the IDHNP blog to learn more about this project, newspaper histories, and interesting historic events.
About Indiana Memory (www.indianamemory.org)
Indiana Memory is a collaborative digital library site providing access to over 350,000 historical and cultural items drawn from 107 contributing organizations around the state. Indiana Memory seeks to support and enhance education and scholarship for all Hoosiers for increased understanding of Indiana's past and its role in preparing for Indiana's future.
Source: Indiana State Library