Saturday, August 10, 2013

Newspaper Search Engine

I came across a new resource to keep an eye on, it's a search engine for newspaper archives called Elephind.com. Unfortunately, at the moment, there's not much on it. While they have over 1000 newspaper titles, there are only 12 archives it's searching among:
  • Boston College
  • California Digital Newspaper Collection (UC Riverside)
  • Cambridge Public Library, Massachusetts (sadly, they've spelled this wrong as well)
  • Chronicling America (US Library of Congress)
  • Door County Library (Illinois?)
  • Papers Past (National Library of New Zealand)
  • Singapore National Library Board
  • Trove (National Library of Australia)
  • University of California, San Francisco
  • University of Illinois
  • University of Missouri School of Journalism (Missouri Digital Heritage)
  • Kent State University (Ohio)
This is a great resource for someone to use if they are doing research in any of these specific locations but unfortunately there are no sources for many parts of the US or most other nations. For example, there are no UK newspapers and there's nothing from Pennsylvania, apart from what the Library of Congress covers, so for PA researches, you'd be better off just searching Chronicling America. Another good free PA newspaper archive is the Access Pennsylvania Digital Repository. They also missed out on a big national free source with Google's Newspaper Archive. And while it's not a search engine, there is an very comprehensive reference list of free and pay-for newspaper archive databases on Wikipedia where you will find many more sources from a vast array of locations. So Elephind is not very comprehensive yet but of course, this is a new search engine as far as I know so it may take time for them to build up their database and that's why it might be worth keeping an eye on.

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