Old Vermont newspapers enter digital age. (Burlington Free Press, 9/7/2011)
Excerpt: Ancient newspaper rants like this, along with front-page witticisms, letters from Civil War soldiers and ads for everything from depilatories to asthma remedies, are now just a few mouse-clicks away.
The Vermont Digital Newspaper Project, part of a federally funded national program, has made about 50,000 pages of 19th-century Vermont newspapers available online, with another 50,000 still to be converted under a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. University of Vermont librarians are spearheading the project, in collaboration with partners from around the state and an advisory board of historians.
The conversions are made from microfilmed versions of the newspapers held in state archives. Vermont is one of 28 states to make old papers digitally available under the auspices of the Library of Congress. The project, called Chronicling America, is a boon to serious researchers and amateur historians alike, not to mention genealogists.
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