I received this in email from Paul Jeffko of Small Town Papers today:
"I wanted to let you know that we are making the SmallTownPapers
Collection available free. Instead of a membership fee paywall, we are
working with Google on a new monetization model they developed for
publishers (like us) that have high-value premium content. Anyone can
gain access to our content by answering a survey question.
"Google calls the system a "micro-survey". They have customers who
pay them to conduct market research. We earn revenue from each user
completed survey. Each "survey" is a single or sometimes a 2-part
question. For each new page loaded, users will answer a survey question,
which takes only a few seconds.
"To access the available free content, users visit www.smalltownpapers.com,
select a title, then look for the link "Scanned Archives of ...
<title> ". From there you can search or browse the available
archives. There are about a half a million pages available now, and we
are adding thousands of pages daily.
"All of the pages and corresponding OCR text are also indexed by
Google, so users can do a Google Advanced Search along with "Newspaper
Archive of <title>".
"Users are invited to contact us about
specific titles found on the
SmallTownPapers website that they would like to have more pages made
available. For example, if a user wants more pages for the
"Shelton-Mason County Journal" from say, 1965, they can let us know and
we'll attempt to get those pages uploaded."
The URL for this post is: http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/05/small-town-papers-now-free-to-access.html
Thanks for sharing this info, Randy. I'll start adding these titles to my Online Historical Newspapers site. Previously, you had to have a subscription via NewspaperARCHIVE.com or Fold3 (which just recently stopped contracting with STN) in order to access their archives.
ReplyDeleteThis is a wonderful website buddy and an informative post!!! i am new here and i found this site very interesting and informative ,, you are a professional blogger i think i have a great interest in such things…thank you for the post buddy and keep on posting nice stuff like this in future as well.
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