The First 62 Years of the Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper Available

The Brooklyn Public Library has set up a digitized archive of the first 62 years of the Brooklyn Eagle, a leading newspaper of the borough of Brooklyn in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The site is located at http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.org.

When you first visit this site (and by the way, I found using IE brought the best results; I could use it with Opera but only a little bit) you'll get a popup warning you that the site is still in beta-testing and is not yet available for use by the general public. I personally had no problems using it; your mileage may vary. It's expected that the resource will be made generally available in the "summer of 2003."

Once you're in the site, you have the option to explore via browsing by date or searching by keyword. Browsing by date was very straightforward. Pick a date (between 1841 and 1902) and you'll get the front page of the newspaper with icons at the top of the screen to browse through the rest. As you run your mouse over the paper, paragraphs will show up in blue. Click on the paragraphs and an enlarged version of the paragraph will show up. Click on an article title and the entire article will appear, enlarged, in a popup window. There you'll have the option to e-mail or print the article.

The keyword search is much more extensive. Here you'll have the option to search by keyword across the whole archive or within a specified date range. You'll also have the option to search within a specified group -- articles only, pictures only, ads only, or all three.

A search for "suffrage" over the entire archive found over 7000 results. Search results are presented eight to a page and include the date, the issue number, a graphic of the excerpt, byline (if any) page, and word count. Check out the small icons at the bottom of the first column of the table of results. From here you can look just at the preview snippet that appears in the results, view the entire article, view the page from which the article came, or add it to "My Collection" (I found the collection thing didn't work yet when I used it.) When you look at excerpts your keyword will be pointed out with translucent highlighting and an arrow. I found some of the OCR to be incorrect, but not so wrong that I wouldn't spend approximately ten weeks digging through this archive.

If you're not interested in searching or browsing by date, you can also browse selected topics, from Advertising to Women and Woman's Suffrage.

The first article I read about this project said it was funded with a $239,000 grant from the federal Institute for Museum and Library Services, with matching funds from the library. I am in awe. I found the searching fast, the interface friendly, and the mechanisms for getting close-ups of the articles and article excerpts very quick. Brooklyn Public Library, I salute you. These are beautiful archives.

Posted to Publications-Archives