The story below is from the most recent Library News from the UF Libraries for UF Faculty. NewspaperCat is powered and hosted within the UF Digital Collections (powered by SobekCM). This has been a great project for the UF Digital Collections to support because it was an active and valid use case for a record-only collection portal, which is often a wanted option for different research, teaching, and public service needs. There’s more in the story below and check out NewspaperCat to see it in action!
Libraries create catalog of digital historical newspapers
The Catalog of Digital Historical Newspapers (NewspaperCat) is available at www.newspapercat.org. NewspaperCat is an online database providing links to over 1,000 full-text digital newspapers in the United States and Caribbean. The project’s current coverage, which began with the Southeastern United States, is growing rapidly and will soon cover all fifty states.
The purpose of NewspaperCat is to improve access to historical newspapers digitized by libraries, archives, historical societies and other non-profit organizations that remain buried within search engine returns such as Google PageRank. These newspapers represent a rich source of primary research material for researchers, students and the general public. The project to build NewspaperCat was funded by the George A. Smathers Libraries and developed with the cooperation of the Digital Library Center of the University of Florida.
As a free-standing online resource with a unique web address, it is hoped that NewspaperCat will improve access to these important primary resource materials by collectively improving their Google PageRank for online researchers seeking historical newspaper content.
Over the summer semester the project has benefited from the work of master of library and information science graduate students from Florida State University and their coordinator, Dana Loving, who have added material and improved access to even more online digital newspaper content. Through their contributions, in the weeks ahead, NewspaperCat will become the first index of its kind to ingest and provide access to the Google News Archive as well as newspaper titles from across the United States and Canada.
– Matthew Loving Romance Languages/ Area Studies Librarian
2011-09-15