[Ads-l] Databases for Historical U.S. Searching

[Bill Mullins]

________________________________
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Bonnie Taylor-Blake <b.taylorblake at GMAIL.COM>
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2022 8:36 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Databases for Historical U.S. Searching

Two examples come to mind, Fred.

I was able to find a 1922 appearance of "the whole six yards" (sorry,
everyone) in that Georgia database and several "whole mary anns"
(1909-1925) in that California database. I couldn't (and didn't) find them
over at Chronicling America.

I'm not sure whether the latter has holes or whether some small-town
newspapers just aren't offered up to Chronicling America or whether I'm
just not skilled at using that database, but these experiences have
prompted me to dig into these and other state databases whenever I can.

-- Bonnie

On Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 8:06 PM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:

> Thanks, Bonnie, for your usual helpfulness.  But I have always assumed that
> all these state newspaper databases are covered by searching Chronicling
> America.  Is that not true ?
>
> Fred Shapiro
>


It's my understanding that Chronicling America came from a State Newspaper program that was originated by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Each state gets grants to do a census of existing newspaper titles (paper and microfilm) and further grants to digitize the titles.  I used to keep up with how the program was going, but haven't looked into it for a while, and don't know how far along the project is (I think the census is more or less complete, but the digitization is ongoing).

So, while Chronicling America is a database on a national scale, many states have databases that capture only that state's titles.  And quite often the State collection will have more than Chronicling America will for the state in question.  For example, Ben Zimmer recently did a WSJ column on "maverick", and I found cites in the Texas state collection that I didn't find elsewhere.  Chronicling America typically doesn't include much after 1926 (the current "public domain" transition year, which advances every Jan 1), but state collections don't seem to be so limited (an issue that may not mean much to Fred, given that he's looking for collections from the 19th century.)

The Google Sites "fulltextdatabases" link that I included in my immediately previous email has links to many of the state collections, but not all of them.  Further, as I recall, some states may have more than one digital collection (and I have no explanation for that).

Google "Alabama State Newspaper digital Archives" or similar strings to find the current link(s) for any given state's collection.

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