Tuesday's Tip: Updates to Chronicling America

Updates to Chronicling America now bring the total to 5,206,652 pages of newspapers available. Not familiar with this free site sponsored by the Library of Congress and NEH? Visit the site at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov to take advantage of this fabulous and free genealogy newspaper resource.

You can search and download pages from selected American newspapers across the country from 1836-1922. To see a list of the digitized newspapers and enter search terms, visit at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers.

The site also offers the U.S. Newspaper Directory, supplying information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. You can identify what titles exist for a specific place and time, and how to access them at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles. Newspaper titles currently listed: 151,814.

Chronicling America currently has over 5.2 million individual newspaper pages available for viewing and/or downloading, representing 801 titles from 32 states (as of December 2012); though the project initially targeted newspapers from the 1900-1910 period, it has gradually expanded so that papers scanned currently span the years 1836-1922. Papers from 4 additional states – Iowa, North Carolina, Michigan, and Maryland – are slated to be added to the collection, and grant-funded projects to scan papers from these states are underway.

Chronicling America, begun in 2005, is a database and companion website produced by the United States National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, maintained by the LOC. The Chronicling America website contains digitized newspaper pages and information about historic newspapers to place the primary sources in context and support future research. The project is described as “long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages.”