The Library of Congress Chronicling America Newspaper Website now has more than 500,000 newspaper pages available free on the website after adding over 79,000 pages. In addition, there are several new site features. The newspaper pages, dating primarily from 1900 to 1910, represent 61 newspapers from California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah and Virginia.
New features in Chronicling America include:
"See All Available Newspapers" page - A list of all newspapers with pages available on the site. RSS feed and E-mail Update service - Users can subscribe to Real Simple Syndication (RSS) updates or e-mail delivery. (see list under Topics/Newspapers and Journalism). Updates will include notices of added content and other points of interest.
Newly available content includes pages from the Hopkinsville Kentuckian and Liberty, both published in Kentucky; additions to The Times Dispatch (Richmond, Va.), New York Tribune (New York, N.Y.), Deseret Evening News (Salt Lake City) and others.
Highlights of content available in Chronicling America include:
News of original discovery of the historic "Waldseemüller Map" of 1507 (More information about this map and the Library’s acquisition.)
The assassination of President McKinley in 1901
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906
The construction of the Panama Canal
The future for access to free newspapers is bright according to Guy Lamolinara at the Library of Congress. "Ultimately, during the next 20 years, NDNP will create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 from all the states and U.S. territories. Also on the Web site, an accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information directs users to newspaper titles in all types of formats. The information in the directory was created through an earlier NEH initiative: the United States Newspaper Program. The Library of Congress is also digitizing and contributing to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper pages drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership."