Online Text News

[Joel S. Berson]

Fred,

Have you given comments to the American Antiquarian Society?  When I
used EAN for the first time there last spring, they expressed
interest in receiving feedback.

Are you really finding 95% false hits?  (I assume you mean false
positives.)  Have you uncovered any false negatives?  (A more
difficult task.)

I find an annoying number of false positives, but nowhere near
95%.  (My biggest gripe would be its very slow response.)  And I have
certainly had successes--for example, finding advertisements for
exhibitions of camels in the northern colonies between 1735 and 1790;
finding dancing-masters from 1704 to 1750.

Joel

At 1/4/2006 09:03 AM, you wrote:
>I forgot to mention that Gale is also working on an online collection of
>19th-century newspapers, probably American in focus.  Hopefully this will
>be better than the worthless (95% false hits in my experience) Early
>American Newspapers from Readex.
>
>Fred Shapiro