New Online Platform Provides Access to Thousands of Historic Indiana Newspapers

From the Indiana State Library:

Three weeks after unveiling the new Indiana Memory, the Indiana State Library has now introduced the website’s new Indiana Newspapers platform. Clicking on the “Indiana Newspapers” icon on Indiana Memory will take you to all of the newspapers digitized as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program.
This collection contains 14,214 issues comprising 95,455 pages and is continually growing. Many of these titles are also available at the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America website. IDHNP provides free, online access to high quality digital images of Indiana’s historic newspapers, links to online resources and assistance to other organizations in making their collections accessible. This online resource is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant enabled the Indiana State Library, in partnership with the Indiana Historical Society, to digitize Indiana newspapers for the National Digital Newspaper Program.
“We are moving ahead with digitizing another 100,000 newspaper pages as a continuation of the NEH grant,” said Chandler Lighty, Historic Newspaper Digitization Program Manager. “Over the coming months and year, historic digitized newspapers from South Bend, Evansville, and Vincennes will be available.”
The content on the Indiana Newspapers platform is being displayed in Veridian software, which is operated by the Indiana State Library and funded by the U. S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act. The crowd-sourcing component of Veridian allows you to register and make corrections to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) . For instance, if you find an individual’s name garbled in the OCR, you can correct it yourself, so that future users can find that person’s name in the newspapers easier.
“The software is really exciting because users like you can correct the OCR text,” said Lighty. “If you researched with any digitized content in the past, you may have discovered that the search results you received were often only as good as the OCR.”

Note: Crowd-source Your Favorite Indiana Newspapers! (via Indiana Historic Newspaper Digitization Project)
See Also: More Indianapolis Newspaper Issues Added to Chronicling America via Indiana Historic Newspaper Digitization Project)
See Also: Indiana’s Digital Library Unveils New Look & Functionality

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Digital Preservation, Funding, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users