ResearchBuzz

The state of North Carolina has launched a new digital archive collection of NC newspapers called, strangely enough, the North Carolina Newspaper Digitization Project. It’s available at http://www.archives.ncdcr.gov/newspaper/index.html and contains almost 24,000 records of newspapers that date from 1751.

You can browse the collection, but since that consists of over 4000 indexed items I don’t recommend it. Instead do a keyword search, but if you want to see what’s here start with the newspapers included list, which seems to focus more on newspapers in the coastal and eastern part of the state. (And there are some olllldddd newspapers in here.)

I did a basic keyword search for Mayberry. (You can also search by year or by a particular newspaper.) I got seven results showing in a list that also included a thumbnail of the newspaper as well as its title and the date of the particular result. Clicking on the thumbnail of the page gives you a viewer window to show you the whole page, with icons for moving around, zooming, turning the paper, etc.

One of the results I got was from a Wilmington newspaper of 1796. The newspaper (The Wilmington Chronicle) was printed in three columns and was amazingly easy to read even without considering it was over 200 years old. The only aspect that was a little difficult was the “esses that look like f’s” thing. (Other newspapers I looked at from that time period were incomplete — torn, etc. Your mileage may vary.)

The most recent result I had was for the Carolina Watchman, an issue from 1894. This issue was actually a little harder to read, with some sections faded and some blurry with too much ink. Keywords for which you’re searching are highlighted in red, but to maneuver around the screen you have to use that zoom tool and directional icons, which can be a bit frustrating.

As with other newspaper collections I’ve reviewed recently, the advertising is included with the paper and the text is indexed. I had some luck searching for bitters and patent medicine. Then I remembered I could get some good history of these newspapers and searched for declaration of independence, which found news and a couple of scorching essays.

While of course it would be even better to have newspapers from all of the state represented in this collection, you could spend a lot of time here just browsing, reviewing history from the perspective of a contemporary newspaper. Excellent reading.

Google’s hard at it in the labs again with a new feature called Living Stories. Living stories are more like living “topics,” with story topics put together into a permanent place and updated in a variety of ways. It’s available at http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/.

Once you get to the site, pick a story you want to follow. I chose executive pay, which is at http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/lsps/executivepay. Note the permanent URL. When you get there you’ll see a page which looks like this:

There’s a summary at the top of the page, a timeline, and down the middle of the page stories. The left side of the page beneath the timeline provides pointers to different kinds of media/information, while the right side provides links to important stories in the timeline.

When you click on a story you find interesting, you don’t leave the page — it opens right in the middle, which does make it easier to take in several stories without losing your place or getting hugely distracted. Key people and companies in the stories are highlighted; click on them and you’ll get a popout with a one-sentence explanation and sometimes a picture.

A took a look at the supplemental materials. There were plenty of images and quotes available, fewer videos. There were some great graphics showing the evolution of executive pay.

So how do you keep up with the changes to the stories if the URL is permanent? You have a couple of options. The first is a good old-fashioned RSS feed. The second is signing in with a Google account and getting updates to the story e-mailed to you.
Personally I’d prefer RSS.

Google’s put together a great way to group a lot of stories in one place. The one problem is the sources. The New York Times and Washington Post are great papers, but there are lots of other great papers, too, and you could get an even more multifaceted look at
a story if you used several different sources. I’ll be a lot more interested in this when I can go to a story about something happening in Virginia, for example, and get stories from every indexed news source in the state.

Hot diggity biscuit! A software engineer at Google noticed there was a Facebook group called “Get Google Magazine Search to provide a list of indexed titles” (I wish I had known about that one, I would have joined!) and took some time to actually make a page on Google Books that lists all the available magazine titles.

The list of titles is at http://books.google.com/books?as_pt=MAGAZINES&rview=1. This is a cover/grid view; there’s also a list view if you prefer. You can filter the magazines displayed by those which have full view only and those which are public domain only. I didn’t see any magazines that were listed as public domain only, but when I restricted my results to those magazines which were full view, I got several dozen titles, from The Alcalade to Yoga. Some highlights (to me anyway): Billboard, Dwell, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science.

This is great! I’m so glad that you can see all the magazines that are available on Google Books (and I’m astonished and happy there are so many!) Now for the next possible trick — how about being able to search a set of magazines at a time? (Instead of just one of them or all of them?)