Chicago Tribune (now 2004)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

   Ah, they've discovered that the 19th century Chicago Tribune is nearly
illegible.  No surprise there!  You spend hours and hours straining your eyes,
and then you find something really important, and then you tell the Chicago
Tribune, and then you get rejected for seven years--how much is all that worth?
   I would have preferred even the pieces of those first seventy years rather
than nothing at all.  "Sundae" is from the 1890s, and those years are
somewhat legible, so why can't we have it now?
   Here's the bad news:


Subj:   RE: Chicago Tribune
Date:   10/13/2003 9:09:30 AM Eastern Standard Time
From:   <A HREF="mailto:christopher.cowan at il.proquest.com">christopher.cowan at il.proquest.com</A>
To: <A HREF="mailto:Bapopik at aol.com">Bapopik at aol.com</A>
CC: <A HREF="mailto:mary.sauer-games at il.proquest.com">mary.sauer-games at il.proquest.com</A>
Sent from the Internet (Details)

Barry,

Glad to hear from you again.  And especially glad that the LAT is proving
beneficial.

Here's the update on the Tribune.   As we began to digitize the earliest
years of microfilm for the Tribune, we found the film quality to be so poor that
it was virtually unusable for creating a searchable ASCII text.  The film (done
long before ProQuest/UMI handled it's creation) had poor image quality with
frequently torn and missing segments.  Both the Tribune and ProQuest knew there
would be quality issues with the earliest years; however, it proved to be
more significant than we had hoped.

In view of the situation, ProQuest launched a nationwide search to track down
original hard copy and/or alternative film sources for the first four decades
(1849-1889).  Fortunately, we've located the majority of the years in this
time period.  We will now refilm these years and then digitize.  We are
anticipating a Q1 2004 launch for the early portion (pre1923) of the Chicago Tribune.
Though we have digitized a significant portion of the useable film from
1890-1922, we won't launch the product until the fuller time period of 1849-1922 is
ready for our customers.

As for Puck in APS, I'm referring you to Mary Sauer-Games, Director of
Publishing, for that particular product line.

Chris
Chris Cowan
Vice President, Publishing
ProQuest Information & Learning
300 N. Zeeb Road
Ann Arbor, MI  48106-1346
Ph: 800-521-0600, ext. 6204
Ph: 734-975-6204
Fax: 734-975-6271