The Daily Progress’ earliest archives have been made available online, the newspaper reports, in an effort spearheaded by Jefferson Madison Regional Library and facilitated by the University of Virginia library. Eight people collaborated to scan in and catalog most every issue from 1892–1923, with the resulting scans hosted on UVA’s website. They’re just images scanned from microfilm at this point—the text itself isn’t searchable, and it can be tough to read at times—but it’s a great start. The project was funded jointly by JMRL and a private foundation.
So far I’ve just been opening up random issues and browsing around, and it’s just fascinating. Local history buffs are going to disappear into these archives and not be seen for weeks. For example, to pick one out of a hat, the front page of of the December 4, 1894 issue informs us that “metal is now being placed on Park Street”; “pheasants, judging from the number seen at the restaurants, are quite plentiful”; “the first car was placed on the electric street car line”; and “Mr. Thomas A. Marshall, while engaged in cutting feed for stock yesterday at ‘Clairmont’ Farm, had the misfortune to sever the index finger of his left hand between the first and second joints.”
News is enormously valuable the day that it’s published. Its value drops precipitously thereafter but, given enough time, it begins to rise again. Apparently after 121 years, it’s nearly as good as today’s news.
I’m absurdly excited about this. I wish there was an option to just download all of these archives.
Oh, wonderful! Thanks for the heads up.
An amazing project for sure. I hope that they are able to one day finish all the print-only editions.
It’s hard to imagine that these images can be indexed. The image quality is very poor in spots. I wonder if Google would be interested in contributing their amazing OCR capabilities to the project?
Waldo– have you talked to the libraries about getting access to the material in mass? Barring restraints from intellectual property interests, it shouldn’t be that hard to do.
I’m so wildly overcommitted that I think I’m actually a bit grateful that it’s not possible for me to download it—I might find myself writing OCR spelling correction code at 4 AM. :) My hope is, rather, that other people might be able to do something interesting with it! Perhaps some such person will see your suggestion here and act upon it.
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