Friday, April 17, 2009

The Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection


http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/Default/Skins/Colorado/Client.asp?Skin=Colorado&AW=1239506677238&AppName=2


The Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection includes 147 newspapers published in Colorado from 1859 to 1923. These newspapers come from 60 cities and 40 counties throughout the state, and contain papers published in English, German, Spanish, or Swedish. The website provides access to over 477,000 digitized pages from these newspapers, and Newspapers are digitized from microfilm copies owned by the Colorado Historical Society. The collection was build by the Colorado State Library, the Colorado Historical Society, and the Collaborative Digitization Program, and supported by Library Services and Technology Act grant and state funds.

I find that browsing the collection is easy and simple. Users can start by clicking “Browse” button, the list of available titles appears in the dropdown box. Users can select the newspaper title, and then select the year, the month, and the day from the set of dates highlighted on the calendar. The newspaper issue loads on the screen, move the mouse over the article and click the part they want to read, a new Article Window will appear. Users even can select Article > from the toolbar to add an item to MyCollection, or to email, print or save an article as HTML, especially, the collection provides these function icons on the same webpage. In addition, users can select View> from the toolbar to see the article in different formats.

For search function, users first type the keywords in the Search For box, select the newspaper title they want to search (if users want to select multiple titles, they can hold down the Ctrl key or shift key), and select time period, the list of search results will appear. Users can click on the image of the article to open a new article window to read. The search term is highlighted in the text of the article. What‘s more, users can click on the buttons of AND, OR, NOT or NEAR to insert a search operator into the Search For box.

Overall, the collection is well-maintained. Especially, users can save the articles to their computers. The intended audience should be students, researchers and individual interested in Colorado history.

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