Thursday, June 16, 2016

NewspaperARCHIVE Collection on MyHeritage May Disappear Next Tuesday

...but it may come back later.  Or not.  I have hope!

The MyHeritage Blog post today titled NewspaperARCHIVE.com Collection Notice says this:
We wanted to give our users a heads up that MyHeritage's license of the newspaper content from NewspaperARCHIVE.com is about to expire next week. This means that on Tuesday, June 21, 2016, the collection will be de-published (withdrawn) from MyHeritage. In addition, pending Record Matches from this collection will be removed. Confirmed Record Matches that were saved to family trees will remain in place.
MyHeritage is currently in negotiations with NewspaperARCHIVE.com to enter into a new license in order to keep this collection on MyHeritage. If these efforts are successful and the content is relicensed, then it will be reloaded onto MyHeritage and the Record Matches will return, and all links to newspaper records that were saved into family trees will continue to work. This will work well even if the newspaper content will be de-published for a while, and then return.
We advise users who have pending Record Matches from this collection, to view them before Tuesday, and to confirm as many as of them as possible and extract their value into their family trees.
This does not affect other newspaper collections on MyHeritage such as Trove from Australia and Jewish Chronicle from the UK.
Thanks,The MyHeritage Team
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My Record Matches list by collection shows this from the NewspaperARCHIVE.com collection for persons in my MyHeritage family tree.


Over several years, I have been occasionally reviewing the pending Record Matches and either Confirming them or Rejecting them (often because they are duplicates) - I have resolved 1,505 of them and have 879 to go.  The NewspaperARCHIVE.com record collection has been invaluable for adding obituaries, articles and notices about my ancestral families.  MyHeritage is the ONLY website that matches newspaper articles with family tree names and provides them as Record Matches (e.g., "Hints" on other websites)..

I hope that MyHeritage is able to make an agreement with NewspaperARCHIVE.com that preserves the collection, and the Record Matches from the collection.

If they do, I hope that MyHeritage and NewspaperARCHIVE.com improve the reliability of the page images appearing on MyHeritage - in many cases, the page image fails to load, which is very frustrating.

What can researchers do now?  As the MyHeritage blog post suggests, they could use the Record Matches for NewspaperARCHIVES.com on MyHeritage to find as many useful records as possible.  I plan on doing that.


Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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3 comments:

becky said...

I've never had any luck searching Newspaper Archive through MyHeritage anyway. I can't seem to narrow down my searches to a manageable number. I'm not a newbie - I have no trouble on Newspapers.com or Genealogy Bank. I guess I doing something wrong.

Michelle Ganus Taggart said...

I love the collection and hate to hear this. I guess I have a busy next few days ahead !

Elizabeth O'Neal said...

The Los Angeles Public Library offers remote access to NewspaperArchive with a library card. I sure hope whatever has affected the relationship between MyHeritage and NewspaperArchive won't be affecting LAPL!