Thursday, September 1, 2011

Content from SmallTownPapers and Gannett Leaving Fold3

I received this news from Fold3 via email:

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Content from SmallTownPapers and Gannett Leaving Fold3

On September 15th we will be removing from Fold3 some of the newspapers that came from two of our partners, SmallTownPapers® and Gannett.  This is due to contractual issues and we have no plans to remove any other content from the site.

Here are a few questions that you may have about this change:

Which titles will be removed and which will still be available on Fold3?

All titles from SmallTownPapers and Gannett will be removed.  Nearly all of these titles are from our newspaper collection.  To help you see which titles will be affected, we've collected those that will be removed into a category called
"SmallTownPapers and Gannett" in the "Other Records" category of the browse on the site until they are removed on the 15th.

Only titles from SmallTownPapers and Gannett will be removed and we will still have great historical newspapers on the site including The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Constitution and The London Times.

What about images from these titles that I have added to my Gallery or downloaded?

All Gannett images will be removed from the site and will no longer be accessible on Fold3. From the SmallTownPapers collection, we have negotiated ongoing rights to images to which users have contributed (for example, bookmarked, commented on, annotated, spotlighted or added to their Gallery or to a memorial page). All other SmallTownPapers images will be removed from the site. Of course this will not affect any copies of images you have
downloaded to your hard drive.

How does this affect other titles on Fold3?

This only affects titles from SmallTownPapers and Gannett. We have ongoing rights to all the other titles on the site and have no plans to remove any other content.


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I appreciate Fold3.com providing this information, and I'm glad that the five newspapers mentioned are still included in the Fold3 historical collections.

The Small Town Papers site is free to access (www.smalltownnewspapers.com).

disclosure:  I have a fully paid subscription to Fold3.com (formerly Footnote.com) and have received no benefits from them for writing this post.

3 comments:

Michelle Goodrum said...

Thank you for the info Randy. I guess I had better start mining the site for those articles I haven't gotten around to downloading.

I figured it was only a matter of time before this began to happen.

Rob Stanhope said...

Hi Randy, I've been a long time member of Footnote.com (now Fold3) too and I have "spotlighted" a few stories that I found in the Small Town Newspaper collection. It seems that while the STN collection will be unavailable at Fold3, any images from it that I have contributed too will still be available to me. Or at least that's how I read this quote from the email I received:

"We've arranged with SmallTownPapers® to have ongoing rights to images that users like you have contributed to (for example, bookmarked, commented on, annotated, spotlighted or added to their Gallery or to a memorial page). You will still be able to see these images in your Gallery or memorial page, in your list of Bookmarked images, or in your list of contributions."

Thanks for pointing out that the STN collection is available for free at its own website.

Celtic Tree said...

According to the Small Town Newspaper site "SmallTownPapers offers tons of FREE access to it's searchable newspaper archives through Google News Archive Search. To see if your newspaper is supported, select a title from the list, then look for the Google Archive searchboxes".