The National Endowment for the Arts Humanities is working to put 30 million newspapers online in digital format.
The first of what’s expected to be 30 million digitized pages from papers published from 1836 through 1922 will be available in 2006.
“Anyone who’s interested – teachers, students, historians, lawyers, politicians, even newspaper reporters – will be able to go to their computer at home or at work and at a click of a mouse get immediate, unfiltered access to the greatest source of our history,” said Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He announced the project in a speech at the National Press Club…
The National Endowment for the Humanities is working on the project with the Library of Congress, which has embarked on a broader project to preserve records of American newspapers dating from the late 1600s…
The span of the joint project is limited because type faces of printers used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read, and copyright restrictions are in force on papers published after 1923.
(via Whole Lotta Nothing)