US National Digital Newspaper Program

If you share my interest in historic newspapers as a source for genealogy you may like to view a 73 minute video

Chronicling America and Building the National Digital Newspaper Program

a multi-part presentation from the Library of Congress describing a long-term effort to create and provide permanent access to a searchable database of U.S. newspapers and digitized pages. It gives good insight into the professional effort required to make the program a credible effort of lasting value.

The last part of the presentation which is supposed to be a demonstration showed only a static image of the home page. You may want to follow along on the database here. It includes digitized US newspapers from California, District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, and Virginia, with content from 1900-1910.

It would be nice to think that my readers from Library and Archives Canada would take the time to look at what can be done and be inspired to push a similar initiative in Canada.

(via Resource Shelf)