Philly Inquirer CW articles

[Dave Grieves]

Not sure if this has been reported here yet, but just in case... This article is copied from the Newspapers & Technology website:

Knight Ridder project bringing old pages to life
Inquirer Civil War Archive to be made available this fall

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor

The Civil War-era archives of The Philadelphia Inquirer will be made publicly available this fall following a showcase digitization project backed by Knight Ridder Digital and Olive Software Inc.

The electronic archives will contain The Inquirer’s wartime reporting from 1860 to 1865, according to Ken Doctor, vice president for content services at Knight Ridder Digital.

The project is the first of a wave of digitization endeavors KRD plans to undertake among Knight Ridder newspapers.

When The Inquirer’s archive conversion is complete, users will be able to perform keyword searches of more than 12,500 newspaper pages chronicling the United States’ bloodiest conflict.

In addition to coverage of the Gettysburg Address, the newspaper’s reporting included eyewitness accounts from the battlefields.

Microfilm storing pages from 1860 to 1865 was digitized with Olive’s PipeX microfilm digitization process, which will let readers view, search and print articles and photos as they appeared 144 years ago. PipeX is used in conjunction with Olive’s ActivePaper archiving app to preserve all the elements of a newspaper’s page into one XML repository, which can be easily accessed by standard Web browsing software.

Doctor declined to disclose the digitization project’s costs.

[dedogtent]

Dave, very good information in your post. As I live right down the road in Wilmington, Delaware, can you keep me posted on when this is going online and the link? This sounds like it will be great local news stories from around this area...

[Agate]

Indeed.

Thanks very much for posting.

Regards,

[Dave Grieves]

I'll keep track of when they come on line.

The good news may be tempered some, though. The Inquirer now has searchable archive that go back as far as 1979, and there's no charge for the text search, but it's $2.95 to view the full story. :eek: Hopefully they won't charge for the 61-65 articles.

[Darrell Cochran]

I stumbled across this site earlier this summer

http://www.paperofrecord.com/

It's a fee-for-service site, where you can purchase a monthly or annual subscription rather than paying for articles. Also, instead of indexing individual articles, this site displays full scanned pages of newspapers in its archive. I signed up because they have the Washington Star archived for the war years.

It's like scanning microfilm, and due to the uneven quality of the page images, search terms don't always return hits in places you'd expect, but I've found them to be a good starting point, and I've been able to find a few nuggets about the Regulars from the weeks before First Bull Run ... And it's more convenient than visits to the National Archives.