Comments on: Ann Arbor Library Set to Publish “Old News”

By: abc

abc — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:03:05 +0000

” …in the event that The Chronicle closes.”

Don’t even think about it.

Also I found a certain irony in that aa.com references and links to this article about the archives. Given the history I would have expected them to have known about, and reported on this, first.

By: Vivienne Armentrout

Vivienne Armentrout — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:52:34 +0000

That is great news, because often the Chronicle is the only source of real-time reporting on many fronts. It will be a valuable historic archive (I treat it as one now).

By: Mary Morgan

Mary Morgan — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:32:18 +0000

One more thing re. "Looking forward to the date when 'now' is 'history'..... We granted the archiving rights to AADL in August 2010 – I wrote about the decision and our reasons for it in a September 2010 column: [link]

By: Dave Askins

Dave Askins — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:12:59 +0000

Re: [7] The Chronicle has already granted all necessary legal authority to the AADL to preserve public access to the publication’s complete archives, in the event that The Chronicle closes. AADL would be able to take the whole database, not just “snapshots.”

By: Eric Boyd

Eric Boyd — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:56:08 +0000

Looking forward to the date when “now” is “history”, it would be great if the AADL could work out a deal with annarbor.com, the Ann Arbor Chronicle, and other online periodicals to take daily “snapshots” of their new content and store it for historical purposes.

That way if a company goes out of business or their archives fail, we don’t lose the history of “now”.

If this undermines the business model of our modern-day news sources, then perhaps the content could be embargoed for an appropriate period of time determined by the content-owner.

By: Roger Rayle

Roger Rayle — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 02:20:03 +0000

I’m looking forward to reviewing the AA News articles about the Pall/Gelman 1,4-dioxane contamination with the copies we at SRSW have collected over the years to make sure we have all of the articles archived and indexed.

By: Tom Brandt

Tom Brandt — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 01:31:56 +0000

This is a fabulous project. I am so glad both the AA News and the AADL were able to start this.

By: Andrew MacLaren

Andrew MacLaren — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:48:52 +0000

Agreed, Jim! That is one of the whole ideas of making things available on the web, so everything we put up will have accompanying OCR whenever possible (some pages result in pure gobbledygook). Correcting the OCR, which is another herculean task, is something we will have to work on over time. We will also be using our traditional library skills to apply keywords and pull out meaningful pieces of information to make those more easily searchable.

As for the photos, whenever we can locate the original negatives we are scanning from those. That means that some images will continue to exist only in newsprint but the ones we have negatives for will be clearer than they’ve ever been seen. Take a look over the weekend to see what we’ve put up, I think you’ll be pleased.

By: Jim Rees

Jim Rees — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:07:29 +0000

This is fantastic. But also a bit discouraging that less than 1% is done. The News is already available on microfilm, the problem is finding what you need if you don’t have an exact date. Will this project result in and OCR’ed, searchable archive like the NYT? That’s what I’d like to see. The other great thing will be if all those negatives can be indexed and digitized. Scanning a photo from microfilmed newsprint, which is what we have to do now, gives a very poor result.

It would also be nice the get the copyrights cleared up. Better yet, get Congress to re-instate limited copyright lifetimes, like it says in the Constitution, but that seems hopeless.

By: Vivienne Armentrout

Vivienne Armentrout — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:55:31 +0000

I hope that the AADL still has the physical microfilm copies of News editions that I recall using in research projects, and the readers to use them.

Wonderful that AADL is carrying out this project. It is a real gift to our community and to future historians.