Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 17:01:11 -0600
Subject: historical newspapers on-line: how? what demand is there?
from Richard Jensen:
Jack Nagy of Accessible Archives, has already published one
CDROM of a major colonial newspaper, The Pennsylvania
Gazette. The scholarly reviews of it were excellent. They
are planning more colonial papers, plus a set of local
newspapers for one Pennsylvania county, plus a large
selection of Civil War newspaper stories. One cdrom can
hold thousands of long stories, plus illustrations.
Accessible Archives includes a powerful search engine on the
cd-rom, which permits Boolean searches of words in the text.
Problem: they charge $500-$1000 for cdroms, which limit
sales to a few libraries. Most historians cannot get access.
(Do Libraries loan cdroms interlibrary loan?) Would some
sort of on-line access be useful to scholars?
Richard Jensen
[copy of Nagy to Jensen]
Richard, We are extremely interested in exploring
making our newspaper databases available for On-Line
access for users to search. Many institutions have
asked us about this possibility rather than purchasing
a CD-ROM from us. How would we make people aware of
such a service if we were to make it available? Any
thoughts would be appreciated.
Jack Nagy
73551.450@compuserve.com
***************
[2]
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 18:51:11 -0600
From: IN%"U20566@UICVM.UIC.EDU" "Wendy Plotkin" 5-JUL-1994 18:07:38.28
In assessing the utility of the Pennsylvania Gazette CD-ROM, it is
important to be aware that Accessible Archives selectively edited
the Pennsylvania Gazette to exclude all "foreign" news. I wrote
a positive review of the Gazette CD-ROM for the Journal of American
history, for which I was criticized by one colonial scholar because
of the editing.
A professor of colonial history here at UIC, Greg Roeber, also
indicated irritation at the selective digitizing of the Gazette,
and, because of it, indicated it was not worthwhile for UIC to buy
it.
I still believe there is some utility in the Pennsylvania Gazette
CD-ROM for domestic news during the colonial period.
However, Accessible Archives undertook a more subjective selection
in its Civil War CD-ROM, in which there was less of a clear demarcation
of what it was including and what excluding.
In assessing the utility of on-line databases of this sort, it is
important to ask whether they are worth the purchase if they includes
parts -- and in some cases, subjectively chosen parts -- of a
complete run of a newspaper.
Wendy Plotkin
H-Urban