Thursday, November 29, 2012

First Look at Newspapers.com Subscription Site

After receiving the press release for the Ancestry.com announcement of the www.Newspapers.com subscription website, I signed up for the 7-day free trial.

1)  Here is the home page:


There are links at the top of the page for Home, Search, Browse, Papers and Clippings.

2)  I wondered how many newspapers, and from which states, there were in the collection, so I clicked on the "Papers" link:


There are currently 819 newspapers in the collection.  The small map on the left of the screen above shows coverage, with bright red in Texas apparently the most.  I clicked on California on the map and saw:


The list of California newspapers is in three columns on the screen above.

3)  I clicked on New York state on the map, and on that page, I entered "seaver" in the search field at the top of the page.  I also clicked on the "Show advanced" button and added a date range to the "Year Range" search field (trying to avoid pitcher Tom Seaver!).  I could have added a specific location name in the "Place" field:


4)  I clicked on the first search result on the list - an article from the New York Times in 1997:


5)  The small "What are you looking for" popup window notes how many matches to the search terms are in this particular newspaper page.  There are seven, and I clicked through to number 3 of 7.


Up at the top of the page, the newspaper name, issue date and page number are listed, and there are links for Find, Clip, Print/Save and Share.  I can Print all or part of the page, or Save all or part of the page to a file on my computer.

6)  I clicked on the "Clip" link and was able to draw a rectangle around the particular clipping of interest.  The Clipping popup window lets me annotate this clipping.  When I click on the blue "Clip" button, the clipping is saved within my account.  I can see it by clicking on the blue "See the clipping" button::


The clipping was added to the "Clipped by" listing on the right column.  It appears that each clipping has its own URL - the URL for the one above is http://www.newspapers.com/clip/220/.

I can Share the clipping on Facebook, Tweet on Twitter, or Pin on Pinterest using the social media icons on the title line of the clipping.  I can right-click on the clipping and copy the clipping, or save the clipping to a file on my computer.

This looks like a pretty good excellent Search, Clip and Save process.

My concern is that the holdings in this site are very limited at present.  There are 819 newspapers, with over 25 million pages digitized in the collection.  In the grand scheme of things, this is a really small collection.  GenealogyBank advertises over 6,400 newspapers with over 1.3 billion records.  NewspaperARCHIVE (which Ancestry.com includes within their historical records collection) has over 5,000 newspaper titles and 120 million newspaper pages.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/11/first-look-at-newspapercom-subscription.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Randy, the link at the beginning of the article is pointing to newspaper.com, not newspapers.com. Interesting article, I'm checking out the site now, thanks for the tip!
Dave

Unknown said...

I just noticed that the address of newspapers.com is the same as the address of Fold3 in Lindon, UT. As a side note, Fold3.com only currently has 9 newspaper collections. They are kind of obscure because of the military focus. Newspapers on Ancestry.com have been hard to search compared to their other historical records. Even though we already have the 6,400+ paper GenealogyBank I am happy to see Ancestry.com is working to make newspapers a more user friendly source. Based on their genius city directory search feature released this year, I hope their new focus on newspapers will set a new bar for user experience--although content is low so far.

Sharon said...

I was really excited to see a new newspaper source. When I checked the actual newspapers for the states I really need (New Jersey and Tennessee for example), they are the same very limited number of papers everybody else seems to have for those states. Too bad. But I'll keep my eye on it.