REPLY: Newspaper Series on CD-ROM
Peter Knupfer (pknupfer@ksu.ksu.edu)
Fri, 26 Aug 1994 03:53:11 -0500
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Re: Cab Vinton's query about "Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective" on CD-ROM.
The query refers to "several thousand articles" on the disk. Is this the
same project that confines its coverage to the _Charleston Mercury_ and the
New York _Herald_? I haven't heard of any CD-ROM containing articles from a
spectrum of newspapers -- only the one by Accessible Archives that scans the
two papers mentioned above. I briefly discussed this selection with one of
the project's sponsors and wasn't satisfied with the answers I received.
They do not plan to put the entire newspaper on disk -- only selected
articles. In the case of the _Mercury_, this would mean that the editors
would be selecting articles mainly on the basis of the paper's secessionist
outlook -- other articles, columns, and advertisements of interest to
historians of slavery, social conflict, and economic issues, (let alone of
local history) would be disappointed. I think that the project's directors
have the right idea in attempting to read this material onto disk, but I'd
prefer they searched for and saved material from more representative, or
more fugitive and hard-to-find newspapers than the ones they chose. But
it's possible that I'm referring here to a different project; if there
actually is a disk containing articles from a broad variety of papers, I'd
be very interested to hear about it, and I bet H-Civwar might be interested
in commissioning a review of it.
Peter Knupfer
Kansas State University
H-Civwar co-moderator
pknupfer@ksu.ksu.edu