Using digitized historical newspapers for genealogical research Brian Geiger, California Digital Newspaper Collection Frederick Zarndt, IFLA Governing Board 1. Introductory remarks: Who we are; focus on freely available collections and especially those that allow researchers to create accounts; numerous sites they can pay to access but we won’t spend much time on them 2. Only small percentage of surviving newspapers have been digitized 3. How newspapers are digitized. Focusing especially on OCR, if it’s not OCR’ed well it’s not discoverable 4. How Coronado newspapers were digitized. CDNC’s work with the public library, Coronado Public Library’s work with the publisher, the process of scanning the film and processing the images, etc. 5. Free vs. Pay. 2 kinds of digitized newspaper archives: 1) publicly funded and available for free, 2) commercial sites you pay to access. Dozens or even hundreds of public sites, from small institutional to national. 6. Google won’t always get you what you want 7. Basic search using Elephind: What elephind is. Search “Abraham Lincoln” and explain what they see. Described “facets” 8. CDNC advanced search 9. Collecting What You Find: Right-click features in the CDNC 10. Collecting What You Find: CDNC user accounts 11. Interacting with Content: CDNC 12. Interacting with Content: Tagging and commenting in CDNC