The University of California Riverside’s California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC) is expanding to include weekly papers in searchable archive. The full news story from June 21, 2011 is “California Weekly Newspapers to be Preserved Online” and it’s online here. This is great news about the California Digital Newspaper Collection’s growth and success!
Also, there is a minor point in the news story that I wanted to clarify. The news story notes:
Libraries in Minnesota and Florida also are collecting PDFs of newspaper pages, but do not offer the ability to search text across titles, Geiger said. Software developed to process historical newspapers in the California Digital Newspaper Collection makes it possible to archive PDF pages in a way that permits text searches.
The Florida Digital Newspaper Library does allow users to search text across titles. The searching does not use the PDF versions of the files for this, but the derivatives, so the process is different. This is important for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library’s users, but the point the article is trying to make is also very important. The article is trying to explain that CDNC has implemented new technology that allows this to happen from the PDFs which may be the optimal method for many other digital newspaper libraries/collections/archives. Thus, CDNC is sharing great news both in terms of more content being preserved and accessible in an ever-improving interface and for the software that could be useful for others. I don’t know that the importance of both aspects come through in the article (which may be my own mis-reading or it may be that it isn’t completely clear in the article, which is a normal occurrence when technical news is fused with easier/fun news on new content).
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